Finding Normal, by Jennifer Salvato Doktorski

Gemma and Lucas meet as patients at an inpatient facility for children with eating disorders.  She has anorexia and he has bulimia.  Neither of them really feel like they belong there; they are simply misunderstood.  Gemma wishes that they could just go someplace and be treated as normal.  Why not a place that is normal?  Looking up in an atlas, she finds there are five cities in the United States named Normal and she becomes convinced that visiting them will somehow transform her.

The notion would have just been a whim, but when she shares the idea with Lucas, he's all in for the plan and even knows a way to find a car to get them there.  So they spring themselves from the hospital and start a desperate road trip adventure that will take them far further than they imagined to find normal.  The usual cast of odd characters and side trips to America's weird small towns ensues.

It's a fairly standard teen road trip adventure with an above average story about eating disorders. Most notably, it features a boy with bulimia.  Almost every YA story about eating is about girls so it's nice to highlight the fact that it can happen to boys as well.  But beyond that, the story benefits from applying a light touch, showing them struggling with food but focusing more on the elements of their life that got them to this point.  That in turn brings out the real strength of the road trip genre:  having two characters get to know each other better by baring their souls to each other.  Small, compact, and modest, this short novel punches above its weight.