The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray

The Butler girls are hungry. Some are hungry for food, some for attention, all for love and understanding.

This book blows open with the incarceration of the unofficial heads of the Butler family: Althea and her husband, Proctor. They ran a popular restaurant in their small town and were known and respected for their charity work, especially after a giant flood ravaged their community.

Althea is the oldest sister of adult siblings Viola, Lillian and Joe. Althea and Proctor are parents to teenage twins Kim and Baby Vi. Althea took over the role of helping raise her siblings when her own mother passed away at a young age. Their father was a preacher who was chasing his demons and was rarely around. 

When Althea and Proctor are locked up, Lillian primarily takes over caring for Kim and Baby Vi, with the help of Viola who's visiting from out of town. As if the incarceration of their sister and parents isn't enough, each of the characters is also going through at least one other major (generally unrelated) personal conflict. Through all of this, the adults are trying to do their best while trying to also take care of the twins and the twins are trying to adjust to their new situation while battling the challenges of teenage-hood. Throughout all of this complexity, however, they really want nothing more than the pure love of their mother, something she is sadly not able to provide.

All of this drama makes for complex characters and an engaging plot. It's very much a multi-layered story. At one point, I thought it was almost overreaching having so many subplots going on, but upon further reflection I realized it actually made the story more realistic. In real life, people usually don't just have a limit of one struggle per time period; instead, we're untangling many conflicts at the same time. Some are bigger and more tangled than others but usually our struggles affect not only ourselves but those closest to us. This is certainly the case with the Butlers, who are really mired down with not only their own personal problems, but at the same time they're being shunned by association by the majority of the community members who have now turned on Althea and Proctor.

What they all need the most is to be loved and cared for. They need a respite from the strange hell they've been dumped into. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls shows us that the superhuman strength we all carry deep inside ourselves will gradually find its way to the surface if we have an honest and strong support system. It shows us that as long as we have tight bonds and do our best with whatever events life throws at us, we can overcome and, more times than not, come out even stronger on the other side.

Judge the cover: 5/5