![]() At the forefront is how to help the couple’s teenage daughters cope with what is unfolding, but the novel delves deep into family connections, especially relationships between mothers and daughters, but also between siblings. The novel alternates between a variety of voices, those of Althea and Proctor, and Althea’s sisters, Viola and Lillian as the family tries to come to terms with their new reality. They had been skimming money from the charities they ran and they got caught. But when the novel opens, Althea and Proctor are in prison on charges of fraud. Althea and Proctor were pillars of their community they ran a popular family restaurant and were raising their two daughters. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls is the story of a family dealing with crisis. The title! The cover design! But never mind, those might have been the reasons I first noticed Anissa Gray’s debut novel but it is the powerful writing that really captured me. ― Anissa Gray, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls Althea Marie Butler-Cochran: round, dimpled face rounding, dimpled body smooth, light brown skin wife mother daughter sister mighty force of nature.” ![]() “That river runs through the place where I was easier to define. Tomorrow look for my review of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid which is, once again, something completely different. I got through it in a couple of days by reading and listening to it on audio, and the audio is worth it if you don’t want to pick up a copy. I really like this novel, which I found both page-turning and tender. Through the Saturday Night Ghost Club, Jake begins to realize that his uncle’s quirkiness is actually a symptom of a long-held family secret. ![]() I thought this book was going to be about Jake growing up and out-growing his uncle’s ghost stories, but it turns out to be much more than that. By turns funny and sad, it gets at the heart of what it feels like to start seeing the world through the eyes of the outsiders and castoffs who populate the novel. In a lot of ways, this is a classic coming-of-age novel that evokes writers like Stephen King. Jake recounts the experiences of one summer when he, his uncle, and a handful of others decide to initiate the Saturday Night Ghost Club – a group that visits Niagara Falls’ supposedly haunted spaces and listens to Calvin recount the stories of the gruesome events that happened there. Jake, a fat kid with few friends, spends a lot of his free time with his Uncle Calvin, an eccentric guy who is a die-hard believer in conspiracy theories and owner of a store dealing in occult objects. Set it 1980s Niagara Falls, Davidson’s novel evokes a lot about that place and time to create the setting. I think I especially like stories where the protagonists are kids because that’s what I can related to from that time. Whether it’s actually 80s stuff like re-watching “The Goonies” for the thousandth time, or new things set in the 80s, like “Stranger Things”, I am a complete sucker for it. “we are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.”Ĭraig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost ClubĪs a child of the 80s, I find it really hard to resist the nostalgia of anything set at that time.
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