Empty by K. M. Walton (review)

Since Dell’s father left, Dell has eaten her way to 286 pounds, and her mother has disappeared into a haze of prescription medication. Aside from her loving little sister, everything seems to be a hopeless cause: Dell’s weight gets her kicked off the softball team, her best friend, Cara, is transitioning to the popular crowd without her, her long-time crush rapes her when they are both drunk at a party, and his girlfriend spreads the rumor online that Dell raped him instead. Even though Cara remains by her side, Dell realizes that the shallowness of her relationship with Cara means that she has no one to really talk to about serious things; more profoundly, she realizes that she has no idea how to talk about emotions even if she did have someone to confide in. When a moment of anger results in a broken toe, she stumbles into her mother’s stash of painkillers and the ultimate way out of a life she can’t see as getting any better. Suicide as a result of bullying has become a hot topic in YA lit, and Walton offers a sensitive portrayal of the circumstances that lead to Dell’s fatal decision. She carefully shows the good and the bad in Dell’s life and patiently explores those moments where the bad outweighs the possibility of hope for something different in Dell’s mind. Moreover, she is fair in depicting Dell’s self-understanding: Dell knows that her decisions are not all the fault of the people around her and that there are people who want to help, but what she misses is that no one in her life has helped her acquire the basic skills of helping herself. Her thought processes evoke empathy without necessarily validating her despair, making this a book to recommend to parents as well as their teens for facilitating self-examination and open lines of communication.