Kim: Empty Inside: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager

Rating:
Summary: Not a REAL diary, but fairly realistic
Review: It's amazing - the voice of the teen in this anonymous diary is the exact same immature and ignorant voice of the teen in Treacherous Love, the last book Sparks "edited!" Kim, a fan of excessive exclamation points, just wants to be thin and have a boyfriend. Throughout the journal, we learn of Kim's college applications, crush on a boy who turns out to be gay, struggles with gymnastics, and move into her mother's old sorority's house in college (er, do you automatically get accepted if your alumni parents were members?). Kim deals with all of her problems by bingeing and purging or fasting. She is astute enough to recognize that food makes her feel good when she is down, and that she is using food to celebrate or make herself feel better in certain situations. She also recognizes that as a competitive athlete she needs to eat healthy, but those phases only last a day or two at most. The mandatory hospitalization and ensuing therapy put Kim on the path to recovery when she realizes that all she really suffers from is low self-esteem.
In spite of the inauthentic voice and multitude of problems, Sparks manages to deliver some important information through the cheesy narrative. It is surprising that Sparks doesn't mention the recent trend of websites promoting eating disorders. To give her credit, she never mentions a specific weight until the very end, when we learn that Kim only weighs 79 pounds and still perceives herself as fat. This makes the narrator a bit more acceptable as everygirl, and won't make readers of a healthy size question their own weight. A list of warning signs and associations to contact for more information make this a bibliotherapy title.

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: Kim is a highschool senior getting ready for college. She has a normal life filled with friends, guys, and gymnastics. There is only one thing that makes her different from everyone else. She has an eating disorder that no one knows about and it escalates through her time at college.
Her roommate is mean to her and has a gorgeous guy for a boyfriend. She falls in love with him and they eventually get together. He is the one who notices the constant changes in her body and her daily loss of weight. He tries to help her but he has a job with a professor and is constantly away. Her disorder gets worse and worse, the only way she overcomes it is when something happens to her at school and she gets a reality check.
This book taught me the realtiy of people with disorders and how they can really mess up your life. I have seen people with them and they tend to always be negative about their appearance and only see the bad things, not the good things. "Kim: Empty Inside" led me through the life of a teenager and it gave me this feeling of disgust to what she did to herself. It has put a hard stamp on my heart and I know I never want to go through what she went through. I would reccomend this book to any teenager, especially girls, who think that they need to work on their appearance so that it will encourage them not to go the wrong way.

Rating:
Summary: Great Read!!!!
Review: Kim: Empty Inside by Beatrice Sparks is a biography and it has 162 pages. It is the diary of a anonymous teenager who is facing day to day problems. College, family, friends, and gymnastics add to all that she thinks is going wrong in her life. But her main problem is eating. She thinks that she is fat so she fasts or she purges. One time she even put her food behind a plant just so her parents would think that she ate even thought she didn't. It was shocking to me to read something like this because I never tought that girls would go this far to fit in or be accepted. I give this book 4 stars because its that truth and everything real.

Rating:
Summary: Diary entries can be useful & fun, but not these.
Review: Oh no. It's a book about eating disorders and the title character's father is a surgeon. It was a diary of whining and self pity mostly. How many entries can you read about self loathing and being fat. It was a quick read, but tedious in its juvenile writing and entries. Nobody leaving for college makes an entry about their "Blankey" and "sucking their thumb"? Ahhhh. I can believe the title character, Kim, has mental problems. It was a book filled with monotonous self centered whinings. The highlight involved some diary entries about her quest to become an accomplished gymnast and her need to fit in with her new environment. It did allude briefly to the care needed in women's athletics and education on eating disorders. It did have a few facts about eating disorders that would be helpful, but very few and the young adult audience would most likely be bored with the quantity of juvenile content of "Kim" and wonder why she was heading for college and not fifth grade. I would bypass reading the book and go to EDAP or check "Kim" out at the library and skim through it. It's not a keeper even though the jacket is excellent and very well done. Fictional works can support educational material but you wouldn't want to draw the cart before the horse and muddle around in the eating disorder world of Kim, a spoiled, high school senior/rising college freshman.

Rating:
Summary: Wutever
Review: Ok, first of all I have both Ana and Bulimia, and they cant be cured over night like kims were. Also U dont get all sick and need to be hospitalized in the tiny ammount of time she did. I thought the book was really typical...ive already sold my copy!

Rating:
Summary: Kim: Empty Inside
Review: This book is about a girl named Kim who goes to collage & starts to suffer from an eating disorder. Kim does gymnastics & feels bad about herself because he thinks she isn't as skinny as the other girls on her team. She then turns bulimic, & her life turns from good to horrible.

Rating:
Summary: typical
Review: This book is definately for the young minded. I've put the book down so many times and picked it up not remembering where i left off. This book is really typical. The main character seems awfully young for someone who is supposed to be going off to college. This gave me no new insight about eating disorders. I would not reccomend this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Diary of an Anonymous Teenager
Review: This book stood out to me. I knew it wasn't just another book that lumps all girls with eating disorders into a cookie-cutter image. It was really good! It made me cry! After I finished it, lots of my friends asked to borrow it and they all loved it. I identified with a lot of Kim's problems, especially the self-esteem ones. This is a great book.

Rating:
Summary: It's okay if you can relate
Review: This book was okay if you have bulemia or anorexia. I could relate some of the parts of her feelings and concerns, but for a non-eating disordered person, this book would either give someone awful destructive habits or bore them to death!

Rating:
Summary: Good, but didn't explain well enough
Review: This book/diary, whatever you want to call it, was really good in my opinion, but I didn't think it explained Kim's illness well enough. I am a former bulimic and I didn't think it explained bumimia nervousa thoroughly. This book is a good, quick read though, and I reccomend it to anybody with anorexia//bulimia or somebody who had anorexia//bulimia, like me. Even parents should read this! Although I thought Kim was a little self-centered, the book was really good! Oh and I also thought that this diary was a little over-edited :)