My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (Rating 5) – Filling the Void with Food, Faith, and Family. Set in a Western Michigan town, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray is the story of the three grown Butler sisters who try to pull together in the face of a family disaster. Although they are African-American, race is a minor factor in this universal narrative. As children, Althea, the eldest, was responsible for raising the two younger girls and their brother after their mother died. Now, she and her husband have been convicted of fraud, leaving behind twin teenage daughters with demons of their own who become the responsibility of her siblings. The women in this book hunger for the love of a dead or distant mother and an absent or cruel father. That craving is expressed most vividly through disordered eating, but also through material greed and, paradoxically, self-denial — vain attempts to fill the void or be the kind of “perfect”child a parent will love. The story is told from the perspective of each of the sisters speaking in a distinctive voice. Althea narrates hers from jail, where readers learn during Bible study that the yearnings of even the scariest prisoners are not so different from hers, or ours. Viola, the bulimic middle sister, alternately gorges and purges not only on food, but also on the love of her wife. Lillian, the youngest, remodels the family home but cannot eradicate the ghosts of the torment inflicted on her by her brother. Gray’s novel has autobiographical elements, but she also proves what I know as a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page, namely that imagination and empathy allow all authors, regardless of their background, to make diverse characters come to life on the page and take up residence with readers.
