Louder Than Hunger

Description

A powerful, authentic verse novel exploring a teen boy’s experience with disordered eating, charting the successes and setbacks of his journey toward recovery. Jake feels alone at school and alone at home. Some days it feels like the only people who understand him is the poet Emily Dickinson, and Jake’s beloved grandma.

But there is also the Voice inside him, louder than any other, who professes to know him best of all. The one that says “You have me.”The Voice is loud enough to drown out everything else, even the hunger Jake feels, until his mom intervenes and sends him to Whispering Pines. Here Jake will learn how to confront the loneliness inside him, and find out who he is and what he has to live for.

That is, if he can quiet the Voice… Told in succinct and powerful verse, this novel is a stunning and wholly authentic expression of a young man finding the will;  and the power; to wrest control from the intrusive thoughts that crowd his mind.

The instant New York Times bestseller!

“Every so often a book comes along that is so brave and necessary, it extends a lifeline when it’s needed most. This is one of those books.” —Katherine Applegate, author of the Newbery Medal–winning, The One and Only Ivan

Revered teacher, librarian, and story ambassador John Schu explores anorexia—and self-expression as an act of survival—in a wrenching and transformative novel-in-verse.

But another voice inside me says,
We need help.
We’re going to die.

Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune, and reading mysteries and comics aloud to his teachers. He also likes avoiding people his own age . . . and the cruelty of mirrors . . . and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books—the weird one, the outsider—and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less he eats, the bigger he feels. How long can Jake punish himself before he truly disappears? A fictionalized account of the author’s experiences and emotions living in residential treatment facilities as a young teen with an eating disorder, Louder than Hunger is a triumph of raw honesty. With a deeply personal afterword for context, this much-anticipated verse novel is a powerful model for muffling the destructive voices inside, managing and articulating pain, and embracing self-acceptance, support, and love.