Someone To Love, by Melissa de la Cruz

Since the day that Liv was rejected by her boyfriend for being too fat, she has struggled to gain control of her weight.  She's fasted and purged, starved herself and used laxatives.  And more than anything, she's hid it from her friends and family.  Life as the daughter of an up and coming gubernatorial candidate is full of pressure and fears of public exposure, but the secrets she is hiding are slowly killing her.

Full of lots of partying and alcohol, just to add to the poor life choices depicted throughout, this turns into something of a slog to get through.  While Liv is described as an exceptional girl, we don't see many of her strengths.  We're told that she does well in school, but she spends far more time obsessing about a useless boyfriend than she does about mastering her classes.

But the greatest disappointment of the story is the last section of the book, where Liv turns her life around.  Her recovery is a straightforward process and mostly consists of people lining up to apologize for being so mean to her.  There's little indication of any struggle towards recovery.  Instead, it seems like an easy road.  That's disappointing as, after having to endure hundreds of pages of her complaints and self-delusion, there's no real confronting her own role in her situation.  She makes some small protests that she played a small part in all of this but the focus is on everyone else behaving better. The book ends with her committing herself to loving herself, but there's rarely been much doubt that that is where her heart is.