Kessa

Kessa continues the story begun in The Best Little Girl in the World, about a teenager suffering from anorexia nervosa. The title character carries on her struggle against the psychological disease after her release from the hospital. The story is difficult to followthe omnipresent narrator makes facile leaps from character to character. The transitions are not smooth: one scene featuring Kessa in the present is followed by one in which her father remembers his thoughts from a scene in the previous book. And for all of Levenkron's seeming knowledge on the subject, no insight as to how or why this disease strikes is found here. Perhaps the novel should have been written by someone with a better sense for fiction. A subject as serious as this deserves better. January