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Anneliese
Anneliese is the story of an adolescent girl growing up, set in a precisely captured world of second-world-war New Zealand.
Shona Bracken feels unloved, ugly, misunderstood, and creates her own substitute heroes to cover her loneliness until they are no longer enough and make way for a solution that is as obsessive as it is inescapable.
Shona Bracken feels unloved, ugly, misunderstood, and creates her own substitute heroes to cover her loneliness until they are no longer enough and make way for a solution that is as obsessive as it is inescapable.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published August 31, 1988
About the author
Heather Marshall
8 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Heather Marshall is a fiction writer, moving dexterously between literature for adults and young adults. Her writing is often focused on the lives of girls and women, set against historical events in New Zealand. Her novels include Second-Hand Children (1984), Secret Diary of a Telephonist (1985) and Anneliese (1988). Her young adult fiction titles include Picking up the Pieces (1993), a finalist in the Esther Glen Awards. Her fiction has been extensively adapted for radio broadcast.
Heather Marshall is a fiction writer, moving dexterously between literature for adults and young adults. Her writing is often focused on the lives of girls and women, set against historical events in New Zealand. Her novels include Second-Hand Children (1984), Secret Diary of a Telephonist (1985) and Anneliese (1988). Her young adult fiction titles include Picking up the Pieces (1993), a finalist in the Esther Glen Awards. Her fiction has been extensively adapted for radio broadcast.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 18, 2025
Content warning - this review contains a discussion of eating disorders.
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I re-read this recently after locating a second-hand copy (it's now out of print) and found it even more gutwrenching than the first time I read it as a teenager. It's a devastating portrayal of Shona, a teenage girl who never knew her real father (who died before she was born), whose mother never wanted her and subconsciously resents her existence, and from a young age has been continually mocked because of her weight. All this is against a background of New Zealand at war, with newsreels of the horrors unfolding in Europe, fellow students who are Jewish refugees from Germany, young men her family knows heading off to fight and not coming back, rationing, and a sudden influx of American soldiers after Pearl Harbor. Hating herself and the world she lives in, she retreats into books, music and films and constructs an elaborate fantasy life centred around an idealised image of a loving dad, and becomes determined to become Anneliese, her alter ego and a daughter her imaginary dad would be proud of. Her best friend's well-meaning suggestion that she might feel better about herself if she goes on a diet kicks off an obsession that leads to devastating consequences.
Heather Marshall's prose is spare and simple, but no less evocative and powerful for that. The characters are at times unlikable, not least Shona herself, but Marshall still manages to create empathy for them - even Adelaide Bracken, Shona's mother, who is struggling to bring up three girls without her husband and struggles even more to understand or relate to her introverted youngest daughter. By the time I first discovered this book, I'd recovered enough from my own ED to be distressed for the protagonist (rather than jealous of her "success" as I would have been while still in the grip of it) and deeply sympathetic to her family and friends who helplessly watch her deterioration and don't understand how to fix it, though I could still relate strongly to the desire to retreat into a happier world of your own creation and change yourself into someone worthy of it.
While it begins in 1939 and ends in late 1942-early 1943, its themes seem to me to be as topical as ever. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone currently struggling with an ED, but I think reading it in my late teens helped me process what I'd gone through a few years earlier.
I've gone back and forth over the rating - I bumped it up from four to five because it had such a lasting effect on me (on re-read I realised I remembered most of the last chapter almost verbatim).
***********************************************************************
I re-read this recently after locating a second-hand copy (it's now out of print) and found it even more gutwrenching than the first time I read it as a teenager. It's a devastating portrayal of Shona, a teenage girl who never knew her real father (who died before she was born), whose mother never wanted her and subconsciously resents her existence, and from a young age has been continually mocked because of her weight. All this is against a background of New Zealand at war, with newsreels of the horrors unfolding in Europe, fellow students who are Jewish refugees from Germany, young men her family knows heading off to fight and not coming back, rationing, and a sudden influx of American soldiers after Pearl Harbor. Hating herself and the world she lives in, she retreats into books, music and films and constructs an elaborate fantasy life centred around an idealised image of a loving dad, and becomes determined to become Anneliese, her alter ego and a daughter her imaginary dad would be proud of. Her best friend's well-meaning suggestion that she might feel better about herself if she goes on a diet kicks off an obsession that leads to devastating consequences.
Heather Marshall's prose is spare and simple, but no less evocative and powerful for that. The characters are at times unlikable, not least Shona herself, but Marshall still manages to create empathy for them - even Adelaide Bracken, Shona's mother, who is struggling to bring up three girls without her husband and struggles even more to understand or relate to her introverted youngest daughter. By the time I first discovered this book, I'd recovered enough from my own ED to be distressed for the protagonist (rather than jealous of her "success" as I would have been while still in the grip of it) and deeply sympathetic to her family and friends who helplessly watch her deterioration and don't understand how to fix it, though I could still relate strongly to the desire to retreat into a happier world of your own creation and change yourself into someone worthy of it.
While it begins in 1939 and ends in late 1942-early 1943, its themes seem to me to be as topical as ever. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone currently struggling with an ED, but I think reading it in my late teens helped me process what I'd gone through a few years earlier.
I've gone back and forth over the rating - I bumped it up from four to five because it had such a lasting effect on me (on re-read I realised I remembered most of the last chapter almost verbatim).
April 6, 2021
One of my favourite books when I was a teenager.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews