Hunger (Riders of the Apocalypse #1):

"As there was no saddle,
Lisa said to the horse,
"May I pull myself up?"
And damned if the horse didn't nod."

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

A gritty, dirty and rough book to write. Kessler, however, with her sense of stark realism, bitter witty retorts and convulsion to shed light on a darkened subject that haunts a lot of today's youth and adults, manages to craft a strikingly precise story of a seventeen year old who suffers from anorexia.

Lisabeth Lewis counts calories, she works out in her makeshift gym; housed in her dank basement, and inspects her body in the mirror before her nightly shower. Normal teenage girl stuff, right. 

Wrong.

Lisabeth Lewis is in trouble, she is obsessed with her weight, and she needs help. Between her always neatly primed mother, and her insanely busy father Lisabeth's anorexia goes unnoticed. When a handsome man comes to her door one night and leaves Lisa a set of scales she isn't quite sure what to do with them. Little does she know, those scales are the very things that are going to save her.

When a bad night leads to the consumption of far too many of her mother's sleeping pills Lisa meets Death, here is where Kessler decides to give Death a modern make over. The  quirky, handsome and witty rock god of a man is nothing of what most would assume Death to be, but this does not stop him from giving Lisa an ultimatum. 

Take on the role of Famine, one of the four horseman of the apocalypse, or die. Lisa doesn't have much choose in the matter and so begins the descriptive whirlwind of Lisa's new job. Her job takes her to the very brink of Famine crushed country sides, sends her straight intoWar's lioness' den where they go head-to-head and amongst it all Lisa finally learns acceptance. 

A brutal portrayal of a suffering teenager who looks in the mirror everyday and is disgusted. Kessler shows the underbelly of today's youth with such swift delicate words that I feared at one point, if I was not careful the ink would bleed together and the story would be lost. It had been a while since I stayed up late to finish a book, the feeling was welcome.