It has been said that Freud's case histories read like novels. Sours has written a novel that should be read as a case history. His skill as a storyteller, coupled with a fine feeling for language, transforms the protagonists of a case history into characters in a tragedy. While Sours emphasizes that his tale is fiction, its detail and vividness leave no doubt that what he describes is based on real clinical experience with anorexia nervosa patients.

Sours tells movingly of an attractive, intelligent seventeen-year-old