The Luckiest Girl in the World: A Young Skater Battles her Self-Destructive Impulses »

A bright and attractive figure-skating star, Katie Roskova appears to be the luckiest girl in the world. However, the smile she presents to others cannot camouflage the pain she feels inside - panic at the thought of failure, anger at the ambitious mother she seems never able to please, and disappointment in the father who walked out on her when she was a small child. Unable to express her feelings outwardly, Katie internalizes her pain and experiences episodes that she terms "spacing out." There is a way to stop this feeling, what she calls her own private craziness, but it isn't pretty: Katie brings herself back to reality by cutting herself - taking a pair of scissors to her arm until she draws blood. Terrified that her shameful secret will be discovered, she only cuts herself in private and hides her scars beneath long-sleeve shirts. However, as the pressures mount, her self-injurious wounds become more serious - and soon she is no longer able to hide them from others. In this powerful novel, Steven Levenkron demystifies the shocking syndrome of self-mutilation - just as his best-selling The Best Little Girl in the World helped millions to understand anorexia.

Publishers Weekly

As he did in 1978's The Best Little Girl in the World, psychotherapist Levenkron tells a simple fictional tale to illustrate a real-world problem that afflicts millions of adolescent girls. The protagonist of The Best Little Girl suffered from anorexia. Here, 15-year-old Katie Roskova is a compulsive self-mutilator, or "cutter." Katie is beautiful, poised and highly intelligent. A successful competition figure skater with a scholarship to an exclusive prep school, she's driven by her own fear of failure and by her relentlessly ambitious mother. Behind Katie's winning stage smile lurks an anxiety that she can relieve only by cutting herself until she draws blood. Though Katie has practiced self-mutilation since she was 13, her problem has remained undetected. But now her mental health is quickly deteriorating, and alert school administrators detect a cry for help. Levenkron's prose and plot are simplistic, offering less complexity than a good YA novel. His story never aspires to be anything but an instrument for raising an issue. This Levenkron does ably, squarely confronting and clarifying a problem with a minimum of sentimentality. (Mar.)