A novel in which anorexia plays a major role is at risk of becoming pathologized, symptoms of illness overwhelming the narrative. This is not the case in Ibi Kaslik’s beautifully written first novel. In the hands of this young Montreal writer, addictive illness is a dramatic metaphor for a voracious psychological hunger of an unknown cause.

Skinny reads at times like a mystery novel, told in the voices of the Vasco sisters – Holly, a star junior athlete, and Giselle, a medical student, brilliant and very skinny. Despite their eight-year age gap, the sisters’ bond is intense and watchful. Both sense that the key to Giselle’s self-destruction lies somewhere within family memory, perhaps even before their parents, a doctor and a nurse, emigrated to Canada from Europe. The girls’ early childhood recollections are summery and pleasure-filled, yet from the disconcerting initial image, of a tiny child dangling from a tree like squirming fruit, something is out of balance, dangerous, displaced.

As the story opens, secrets of genetics and passion have begun to play out. The family is disintegrating, the father dead from a sudden heart attack. Giselle’s eating disorder has put her into the hospital. She eventually gains enough weight to return home, making cautious, awkward steps toward recovery, even opening herself to love.

Kaslik works many threads here: a flashback to Hungary in 1971 before the parents’ marriage, Giselle’s brief sexual history, epigrammatic and oddly poetic lines from medical texts. The two girls’ voices are contemporary and credible, jokey and young, yet the prose is nuanced, eloquent, and occasionally gruesome. Giselle’s downward spiral is Lowryesque in its freefall, but there are many flashes of joy and humour, and hope. Although Holly too is flawed and driven, in her the vital spark is vigorous and healthy enough, we fervently wish, for her to survive.