When Kim can't handle things, she eats. Then she purges. Sometimes she fasts. She knows she isn't as thin as the other girls on her gymnastics team, and she's worried that now, away from home for the first time as a college freshman, she won't be able to live up to expectations -- especially her own. Eating is the one thing she can control -- or can she?
Beatrice Sparks Book order (chronological)
Beatrice Sparks was an American author known for her books presented as the 'real diaries' of troubled teenagers. These works delve into topical issues such as drug abuse, Satanism, teenage pregnancy, or AIDS, serving as cautionary tales. Sparks positioned herself as the discoverer and editor of these diaries, though records indicate she was credited as their sole author. Driven by her experiences with adolescents, she aimed to create narratives that would caution other young people against falling into similar pitfalls.
More compelling than ever, this classic real-life diary charts an anonymous teenage girl's struggle with the seductive--and often fatal--world of drugs.
Annie's Baby
- 256 pages
- 9 hours of reading
When Annie discovers she's pregnant by her boyfriend, she's devastated. She has never felt so alone. With no one she can talk to, she pours her heart out to her diary, confiding her feelings of panic, self-doubt, and the desperate hope that some day she can turn her life around. She decides she wants to keep her baby and dreams of loving and caring for this little person. But after the baby is born, it's in her diary that she faces the agonizing question: Can she really raise this child on her own?
Who in his right mind wants to talk to a shrink? I don't want to talk about anything. I don't want to feel anything, taste anything ... or anything. The lyrics "just dying to die" run around in my brain day and night... Fifteen-year-old Sam is in pain. He comes to the therapist's office unwillingly, angry, depressed, and filled with guilt over his own self-destructive behavior. He is being drawn deeper and deeper into a black hole of despair from which he sees no way out. The Road Back This is the Real-life story of Sam's Recovery, told from tapes of his therapy sessions. It tells what drove him to leave home, how he survived on the street, and why he was desperate to escape from the brutality of the gang that had become his "family" and from the torment of his own self-loathing. For every teen who has experienced the pain and loneliness of a no-way-out darkness, and for all those who love them, here is the light that can lead the way back.
It Happened to Nancy
By an Anonymous Teenager, a True Story from Her Diary
- 241 pages
- 9 hours of reading
The editor of the classic GO ASK ALICE has compiled the poignant journals of a 14-year-old date-rape victim who contracted AIDS and died.