Posted: July 4, 2025
Author: John Schu
Publisher: Candlewick Press
A fictionalized account of the author’s experiences and emotions living in residential treatment facilities as a young teen with an eating disorder, Louder Than Hunger is a triumph of raw honesty. With a deeply personal afterword for context, this much-anticipated verse novel is a powerful model for muffling the destructive voices inside, managing and articulating pain and embracing self-acceptance, support and love.
Recent decades have seen increased public awareness around the range of health struggles that young people can experience, with previously taboo subjects being acknowledged and represented in popular culture. Such representations are important for putting a human face to these illnesses and demonstrating that they can happen to anyone. Although eating disorders have received increasing attention, they have been portrayed more often as something that affects females, even though males constitute a significant number of those who suffer from them.
In this respect, John Schu’s Louder Than Hunger offers a much-needed perspective with its powerful first-person narrative about a teenage boy who suffers from anorexia nervosa. Avoiding simplistic solutions and an easy resolution, Schu sensitively captures how people with anorexia will experience ongoing struggles with this illness throughout their lives, even with sustained treatment and support from their family and peers. In doing so, it highlights the challenges around treating people who suffer from it. The book’s subject matter can make it a harrowing and difficult read, particularly for those who have experienced similar struggles or know others who have. Nevertheless, the narrative’s emotional and psychological intensity will draw in readers with its realistic and sympathetic rendition of Jake, the story’s protagonist, which will leave a lasting impression.
Based on Schu’s personal experience of having an eating disorder and staying in residential treatment facilities, Louder Than Hunger provides a nuanced representation of this illness that reveals how it can consume someone’s entire life and become a defining characteristic of that person’s existence. Narrated by the story’s protagonist Jake, the story shows how anorexia can manifest through a variety of mental, behavioural and physical symptoms. Besides its physical effects, it has contributed to Jake’s social isolation, psychological problems, poor self-image and an inability to interact meaningfully with other adults and peers. Furthermore, the illness has also impacted his relationships with his family—including his parents and grandmother, as well as other adults in his life.
Throughout the book, Schu conveys Jake’s intense psychological struggles as he vacillates between his growing desire to accept the help of others in order to reclaim his life, and a strong pull towards the familiar, seemingly omnipresent “voice” that has been present ever since he became anorexic. Readers will discover that Jake’s descent into anorexia had its origins in the bullying and negative comments that he has received, which led him to try establishing some semblance of control over his life in other ways, even if they are self-destructive. Entrenching itself in Jake’s mind over time, this internalized voice has fed into his negative self-image and distorted his perceptions of the world around him. Denigrating and criticizing Jake, the voice reminds him repeatedly that he is repulsive, worthless and insignificant, and that he cannot trust anyone or anything that he hears. Exacerbating his self-isolation from other people, the voice tells Jake that no one likes him and that he is unworthy of love, while at the same time assuring him that it is all that he will ever need.
Schu’s decision to narrate the story in verse format provides him with the latitude to convey the boy’s struggles through his word choice as well as their placement and appearance on the page. Taking advantage of spacing on the page, Schu uses this to help convey the tone and atmosphere of the story’s scenes. For example, when the voice inside Jake’s mind speaks to him, its overpowering and abrasive tone is amplified by the words’ appearance in all-caps font and increased white space surrounding the words, which also conveys Jake’s internal struggles with asserting his own voice and taking back control of his life. An example of this appears when “The Voice speaks LOUDER and LOUDER and LOUDER at school,” with each successive instance of “louder” appearing in a larger font. Similar instances appear in the rest of the book and demonstrate that voice’s relentless and omnipresent nature. The capitalization of this “Voice” throughout the book serves to personify it and emphasize the power that it exerts overs Jake’s life. When Jake’s subsequent references to the “voice” are no longer capitalized, it helps to convey visually that it no longer exerts the same influence as before.
Combined with the first-person perspective, Schu’s narrative techniques magnify the story’s sense of immediacy and impact. Readers will feel that they are residing within Jake’s mind and witnessing his experiences unfold in real time as they hear his unfiltered, raw and sometimes repetitive thoughts around his struggles with feelings of self-doubt and self-hatred. The book’s representation of Jake’s thoughts evokes some traits of a stream of consciousness perspective as his thoughts are not always well-formulated, controlled or expressed clearly. In addition, it reveals the processes by which Jake tries to make sense of and reclaim some agency over defining who he is. In relation to this, one interesting element of this book is its incorporation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, which becomes a significant and recurring motif that mirrors Jake’s feelings of being insignificant and unnoticed. His obsession with Dickinson’s poetry becomes a way to escape from his illness, but it also becomes the very means that enables him to step outside of his self-imposed social isolation and connect with another boy his own age.
An important aspect of this book is that it demonstrates how recovery is neither easy nor straightforward, but rather a non-linear journey that is characterized by obstacles, self-doubt and unpredictability. Although having a strong support network may increase the person’s chances for a successful recovery, it is a constant, daily struggle inevitably fraught with obstacles and the potential for someone to slide backwards or experience a relapse. Even with successful treatment, it does not guarantee that the person will not experience setbacks or a potential relapse. For example, Kella is one of the people whom Jake befriends; after leaving the treatment facility Whispering Pines, she ends up returning for a period of time as she experiences challenges with managing her illness. Like Kella, Jake encounters similar challenges. As the narrative progresses, Jake becomes more willing to deal with his illness as he has developed a more positive mindset towards himself and others. He has also gained a support network that will facilitate his ongoing recovery in the future. The book ends on a hopeful note as Jake is able to leave the treatment facility, but at the same time he recognizes that he will need to continue managing his illness in the future to avoid a relapse.
By giving voice to and validating the experiences of people with eating disorders, this book also contributes towards the dismantling of persistent societal stigmas and misconceptions around anorexia and other illnesses that may not be well-understood. These stigmas may cause people to hide their illness and discourage them from seeking the help that they need. Similarly, these stigmas can also frustrate the efforts of those who want to help, but may lack the necessary communal support to do so.
An author of several books, John Schu is a children’s librarian at Bookelicious and a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University. He also runs a blog called Watch. Connect. Read. on his website https://johnschu.com/.
– Yang Lim