Book Review: "The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls" by Anissa Gray

First of all, how cool is the title of this book?

This powerful, poignant debut novel examines how easy family ties can go from comforting to smothering, and how the scars of youth can still prove damaging long into adulthood.

"If, as a mother, I am my father's daughter, and I hate everything about him, what am I as a sister, who was all the mother they had?"

Althea was little more than a teenager when her mother died, leaving her to be a surrogate parent for her three younger siblings, Viola, Joe, and baby Lillian. Their father was a traveling preacher, mercurial on good days and violent on bad ones, wanted little to do with his children, but Althea wasn't really sure how to do more for her siblings than simply follow their mother's example. Sometimes that worked, but sometimes her siblings chafed under her discipline.

When Althea met Proctor, he offered protection—from the responsibilities of surrogate parenthood and from her fears about her father. Although they had two daughters of their own, Althea never felt like she "got" motherhood, often struggling with her relationships with her daughters, especially her oldest, Kim. Althea and Proctor became pillars of the community, owning a restaurant and leading many fundraising events for different charities.

But in an instant, everything fell apart. Proctor and Althea were arrested, guilty of crimes that left their entire community feeling angry and betrayed. They went from being respected to being ostracized, and that treatment extended to their girls as well. Suddenly Lillian is given responsibility for raising the girls, and while she does the best job she can, she has her own problems, her own issues to deal with. And when Viola arrives, trailing the debris of her own life, they try to see if two broken people can help bring normalcy to two teenage girls who have had their lives pulled out from under them.

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls was an emotional read, difficult at times yet full of hope. It's a story of how our lives can be affected just as much by things unsaid as they are by things that are said. It's also a story about how the people we need the most can also be the people who cause us pain, sometimes inadvertently. And it's also a story about how important it is to have people in our corner, and sometimes those people are not whom we're expecting.

Reading this book, it was often hard to believe that this was Anissa Gray's debut novel, because the storytelling was so self-assured. Many of the characters were so rich and complex, and Gray slowly peeled back their layers so it almost felt as if you were getting to know them in real life. Strangely, however, Proctor and Althea remained a bit of an enigma to me, so even though they were at the center of the book, they never felt like fully formed characters, and I didn't understand what made them do what they did.

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is definitely one of those books you'll think about long after you've finished reading it. It's the arrival of an incredible literary talent, and I look forward to following Gray's career.

NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group provided me a copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!