Anna Roux was a professional dancer who followed the man of her dreams from Paris to Missouri. There, alone with her biggest fears—imperfection, failure, loneliness—she spirals downward into depression and anorexia until she weighs a shocking eighty-eight pounds. Forced to seek treatment, she is admitted as a patient at 17 Swann Street, a peach pink house where women with life-threatening eating disorders live. Together, the women fight their diseases through six meals a day. With every bite causing anxiety and guilt, the women struggle to gain control.
Through the support of the other girls, sheer strength, and resilience, Anna begins her long journey of recovery.
Heartbreaking, haunting, and poignant, this intimate look into eating disorders is a solid debut effort for Yara Zgheib. Her writing is quite good, but the characters were underdeveloped. I wanted more of Anna's and the other residents' backstories. Some of the staff are referred to as "Direct Care" and it is never explained who they are whereas all of the other Swann Street staff have names. I wasn't sure if this was an attempt at Zgheib to make Anna seem as though she didn't care enough to learn their names. For these reasons, the book feels unfinished.
Zgheib juxtaposes Anna's unhealthy relationships with men against her eating disorder. She is a woman that is reliant on a man to save her when she needs to save herself. Her relationships with men are unhealthy as is her relationship with food.
My main criticism is that the both the dialogue and past events are set in italics. I'm uncertain as to why some authors choose not to use quotation marks for speech—it is confusing and hopefully this will be corrected in the final version. I also found it trite that the main character was named Anna and she has anorexia, I think a name change is in order.
YARA ZGHEIB is a Fulbright scholar with a Masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in International Affairs in Diplomacy from Centre D'études Diplomatiques et Stratégiques in Paris. She is fluent in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish.
Yara is a writer for several US and European magazines, including The Huffington Post, The Four Seasons Magazine, A Woman’s Paris, The Idea List, and Holiday Magazine. Besides being the author of The Girls at 17 Swann Street. she also writes on culture, art, travel, and philosophy on her blog, "Aristotle at Afternoon Tea"
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