Review: Everything I Know About You

Everything I Know About You by Barbara Dee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How do you help someone who doesn't want to be helped? Should you even try to help someone that doesn't think they need it? The main character, Tally, faces these very questions in Everything I Know About You by Barbara Dee.

Tally is forced to room with one of her least favorite people, Ava, on a school field trip to Washington, D.C. While rooming with Ava, Tally notices that she keeps a list of random numbers in a notebook. There is even a gold star on a completely blank page. At first, she thinks that Ava is keeping track of how much she exercises. However, when Tally notices that the numbers don't add up, she realizes that Ava is keeping track of her calories, and she is hardly consuming any.

Tally confronts Ava about how little she eats and how much she exercises, but Ava refuses to acknowledge that she has a problem and blackmails Tally to keep her quiet. Even though Tally really dislikes Ava, she knows that she needs someone to intervene before she starves herself to death. She is faced with a huge moral dilemma: out Ava and risk being ridiculed by her peers or keep Ava's deadly secret.

Barbara Dee sheds light on a topic that many people deal with but few people discuss. Her writing had me completely hooked from the first chapter. I love that the chapters are fairly short because I think this will help readers stay engaged who have lower reading stamina. This book is a little over 300 pages long, which can be intimidating to some MG readers, but I flew through it, and I think students will as well. In a classroom setting, this book would pair very well with Every Shiny Thing by Cordelia Jensen and Laurie Morrison as they have similar themes.

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