Book Beginning: The Girls at 17 Swann Street by Yara Zgheib

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. You are asked to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

I call it the Van Gogh room. Just a different color scheme. Hazy peach blanket, hazy peach walls. Pastel-green carpet on a cherrywood floor. White blinds and shutters, the window and closet creak. Everything looks pale and tired, a little like me.

I look around and think, This is where it starts. In Bedroom 5, on the east side of a pink house at 17 Swann Street. As good, as bad a setting as any, I suppose, for a story like this. Plain and mildly inviting, dubiously clean. At least there is a window; I can see the driveway, the edge of the street, bits of garden and sky.

My library book club is reading this novel about a young woman with anorexia who has been admitted to a residential treatment facility. It's part diary and part omniscient narrator, and the tone is rather dreamlike. So far it's very interesting and not too intense.