Choices are important, but intentions make the woman, or so we learn in this powerful novel. The story is told via multiple points of view of several strong women in the same family. A good readalike for fans of Tayari Jones.

A very dynamic and psychologically rich story of sisters and family, the ties and the hardships and the secrets that hold them together and tear them apart. The family history is mined to reveal the reasons and motivations for the present, complex and deep. The women are multi-faceted and emotionally real, and react and respond to adversity and crisis in believable and diverse ways. The interplay of all the characters was fascinating and fully engrossing. These are real people you might not always like, but you will want to know how they make it through the challenges before them. Too complicated to detail here. I highly recommend.

The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray follows the Butler family as they deal with the fallout of one of the sibling's decision to commit a crime in their town. The remaining siblings have to deal with remaining in the town and caring for the two teen daughters of the perpetrator. The crime is glossed over in the story but the ramifications of it are not. Lots of family drama and dealing with past behaviors abound in this tale. Read and enjoy!

I wish I could say I enjoyed this book, but I found it disturbing. I am definitely going to recommend for book groups at our library. The author is a talented writer and kept me completely engaged. I know our patrons will appreciate Ms Gray's talent in character development.

While I did not especially enjoy this book, I think our patrons will agree that it is an excellent example of today’s world.

What a great debut novel! The author is adept at language, alternating between small town lingo and prison slang. The book is clearly laid out with chapters delineating whose point of view is to follow. And the characters: heartfelt, heart-breaking, sympathetic, maddening. This feels like a real story of family dynamics in a struggling dysfunctional family. I enjoyed this novel a lot!

Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for the ARC to read and review.

This is a unique and complex novel of a complicated family. Althea is in jail waiting to be sentenced as is her husband. Althea essentially became a mother at the age of twelve when her own mother died, but the surviving younger siblings have a thorny relationship with their incarcerated sister, their siblings, and themselves. That’s what I liked about this book. The three sisters and one brother didn’t have easy childhoods, and their flawed adulthoods reflects that.

When Althea gave birth to fraternal twins, she tried to be a good mother, but she spent most of her time building the restaurant. Now that she’s in jail, her youngest sister is watching over the troubled teenage girls. Battling her own demons, she does her best, but everyone is struggling.

This isn’t a fun read exactly, but it’s well written, and you appreciate the way these characters try their best in difficult circumstances, making a lot of mistakes along the way.

A novel about a family in crisis already has a hook that will form the basis of a plot, but it's what the author does with that storyline that determines the quality of the overall package.
Anissa Gray is an author that knows what she's doing, and allows the reader to follow along as a family deals with the arrest and imprisonment of two of their members.
We never learn too much about the details about the crime, instead we see how the situation impacts their twin, teenage daughters and the rest of the family trying to pick up the pieces.

A poignant debut chronicling a family in crisis set in Michigan. Gray’s Care and Feeding takes place in the aftermath of Althea and Proctor’s arrest and convictions when Althea’s two younger sisters come together and to try and look after their nieces. But the life-changing events expose the faults that have shaped the Butler family—the relationships between mothers and daughters, siblings, issues of identity and body image, guilt and regrets. It is understandably compared to The Mothers and An American Marriage. It’s also a surprisingly fast read for a such and emotionally weighty one.

Comparing a book to An American Marriage is risky, but this debut is up to the challenge! After an upstanding couple in the community is arrested, it is their family who is most affected. Told from the perspectives of three sisters, this book is about mistakes big and small, sleights real and perceived, and what we will (or won’t) do for family.

This family drama explores the lives of three sisters after the oldest is sent to prison with her husband for embezzling charity money, leaving her two teenage daughters to navigate a community bitter about being duped. Alternating viewpoints reveal family secrets long ignored and rifts that may still be mended. For readers of An American Marriage or The Mothers.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Well-written novel about a family and the scars that we carry from our childhoods. The ending was satisfying and hopeful.

A story of conflict within a family and how each member is affected. Not for those who want a nice, easy read.

Really gripping beginning to the story, dramatic and engaging plot. Switches viewpoint every chapter between three sisters each coping with the fallout after, Althea, the oldest sister, and her husband are sent to prison.

The story is there and the characters are very interesting but somewhere midpoint this book started losing my interest. Still worth reading but fell short of expectations after such an interesting opening. I would read the next book by Anissa Gray to see how she grows as an author.

Althea and Proctor Cochran are upstanding members of their rural, poor community- at least until it comes to light that they have been defrauding the same community they were ostensibly helping. Told in alternating point of views, this story explores the way repercussions ripple through a family as they navigate through a crisis.

While this was well-written, it was not a book that I thoroughly enjoyed. The pacing felt a bit slow even as the tone grew occasionally frenetic and those things created a discord for me. That said, if you are interested in the minutia of family life and of thorough examination of how actions have drastic and unforeseeable consequences, then this may be a book for you.

*I received this book from NetGalley in return for a honest review.*

Often, when I get to the end of a book, I'm left wanting to know what happens to the characters after the last page. Much less frequently, do I feel the need to know about what happened before the first page. But that was how I felt with this book. What happened to get this family into this predicament. Some of it was ancient history, some more recent, some became very clear, but a lot stayed very hazy in my mind. I get that the details of the past may not have been the point, but I think a little more history would have helped me to understand the characters actions and reactions and why certain things have meaning. It is clear that Gray's characters are all very much alive in her mind, but I had trouble getting them to come alive for me.

3.5 stars
This book is rare and emotional and hard to read at times, but so compelling. The characters in this book felt so real and honest, it was hard to read at times. The plot wasn’t crazy unique or special but executed well. I just wasn’t as blown away by it as I was expecting to be. It was an awesome read and I would recommend, but if you are expecting an amazing wow best book ever, I don’t think this is it. However it is an excellent book.

An absolutely incredible book I could not put down. This book was about families, trauma, and resilience. And it was most especially about women--sisters Althea, Lillian, and Viola, and Althea's two teenaged daughters--and all the ways they hurt and love each other.

I'm between 4 and 4.5 stars here.

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!

While I put this book on the back burner for a while I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it. The story follows three sisters as they struggle with their teenage daughters/nieces and with themselves. Their relationships with each other are complicated and realistic, and the multiple perspective storytelling really allows you to connect with each woman and better understand her thoughts and actions. By the end I was relieved see each character in a more hopeful and positive position in a way that felt real and not a picture perfect storybook ending.

I requested this title based on a recommendation by author Joshilyn Jackson, whose books I love. Unfortunately, I didn't love this one personally. There are so many characters introduced very quickly, and it was a challenge to remember who evereyone was every time I picked it up to read again. It's a good story, and well written, but I just am not loving it enough to want to finish it.