Review by New York Times Review
NO ONE SEEMS to diet anymore. People may go on a "cleanse" or attempt to "eat clean," but their goal is grander than mere weight loss - they're seeking a vague sense of equanimity that's become known as "wellness." The modern woman aspires to be "strong" and "healthy"; she does not care (or not explicitly) about fitting into a smaller dress size. "Self-care" is trendy, while self-denial is not, even if both require skipping dessert. This new, reverent language around dieting offers innumerable euphemisms for eating disorders. When Anna, the main character of Yara Zgheib's debut, "The Girls at 17 Swann Street," arrives at the clinic that gives the novel its title, she informs a concerned therapist that she is vegan. "I also avoid processed foods, refined sugars, high fructose corn syrup and trans fats," she says with pride. The 26year-old Parisian, a former dancer, sees herself as health-conscious, when really she is starving. At intake, she is 88 pounds. The first of a series of medical reports, printed throughout the novel to mark Anna's progress, states that she suffers from a dozen different conditions including "malnutrition - severe." This early exchange between Anna and her therapist is one of just a few moments in the book that reference contemporary buzzwords, that feel current (another counselor discourages the use of "triggering" language). Eating disorders are often considered a contagion of popular culture, but the residents of 17 Swann Street don't have the energy to watch films or discuss internet memes. Recovery is all-encompassing. The clinic is in Missouri, but it could be anywhere. Anna and the others live in their own private time zone. They eat six times a day. If they watch television, it's reruns of the Olympics from years earlier. What distinguishes Anna from the other gauzy young women at the clinic is that she maintains a daily tether to the outside - her husband, Matthias, who visits every night, between dinner and evening snack. Though the novel's present tracks Anna's time in treatment, there are frequent flashbacks to her blissful former life with Matthias in Paris, vignettes in which food often plays a central role. On an early date, Anna trades her uneaten olives for his discarded pizza crusts. Later on, they are too settled in their happiness to address her anorexia, even when she becomes so weak that she can't enjoy roller coasters, beach trips or sex. The chapters set in Swann Street are written in the first person, in tight, understated prose that conjures Anna's utter exhaustion. "I do not laugh very often anymore. Very little is funny. When I do, it sounds different," Anna thinks. The passages about her life with Matthias are written in the third person, in lush, descriptive sentences. But the true love story of this novel is not between Anna and Matthias, but between Anna and the other residents. "Anorexia is the same story told every time by a different girl. Her name does not matter," Anna reflects. This shared diagnosis leads to a fierce solidarity among the residents. When one girl strains to finish her meal, the others distract her with horoscopes, word games and quiet kindnesses. "No girl left at the table alone" is their golden rule. They are too ill to find relief in the "body positivity" movement happening outside and online; the only people who can understand their overwhelming fear of fatness are one another. Anna's illness may not be unique, but her story is a singular celebration of the lifesaving power of community and small gestures. Eating disorders are associated with the young, white and privileged - the kind of women who tend to be in treatment at Swann Street. But Anissa Gray's debut novel, "The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls," complicates this stereotype. One of the novel's narrators, Viola Butler, is a 40-something black woman with an eating disorder. She is by no means a girl - she's a successful therapist who drives a Lexus - but, like the residents at Swann Street, she is addicted to a regimen of excessive exercise and calorie counting. Control, or the illusion of it, is her drug of choice. The central story line of the novel follows the Butler family as it responds to the unexpected arrest of Viola's older sister. Althea Marie Butler-Cochran was once a widely respected member of her community, a restaurateur and philanthropist, who was caught skimming money from her charities. After her conviction, Viola and their younger sister, Lillian, upend their lives to raise Althea's teenage daughters in the small Michigan town where they grew up. It's a fast-paced, intriguing story, but the novel's real achievement is its uncommon perceptiveness on the origins and variations of addiction. The three Butler sisters, who take turns narrating the story, each have their own preferred method of selfsabotage. Althea steals, Lillian is unfaithful to her husband, Viola struggles with bulimia. In a particularly excruciating scene, she checks into a highway motel with a load of junk food and proceeds to eat, then purge, it all. Afterward, she feels a blitz of relief: "Xanax couldn't make me feel any mellower." As soon as the calm recedes, she reaches for a fresh pack of Oreos. Gray's novel unfolds like a mystery, with each chapter revealing new information about how the Butler sisters found themselves in this situation. This is not a whodunit: Althea is unambiguously guilty. The mystery is why she did it, or why Lillian cheats, or Viola binges. Details emerge about their traumatic childhoods that help to explain their perennial discontent, what Viola describes as "the thing in you that cries out, endlessly, More, please." By the end of the novel, this ravenous hunger has been satiated, at least somewhat, by the sisters' renewed affection for one another, something they had each been craving for a long time. Jessica weisberg is the author of "Asking for a Friend."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Anna Roux feels much older than her 26 years. Her hair, skin, bones, and organs have been deprived of nourishment for far too long, and her thoughts are muffled by a persistent fog of anxiety, irritability, and hunger. Still, when Anna agrees to enter an inpatient treatment facility for anorexia nervosa, she's terrified to confront the demon she's carried inside for so long. Finding comfort and support in their shared struggles, Anna and her fellow patients at 17 Swann Street embark on the most difficult journey of their lives. This powerful and poetic debut by Fulbright scholar Zgheib dives into the confusing, desperate, and heart-wrenching world of recovery from disordered eating. Zgheib never lets Anna's diagnosis define her but convincingly allows it to inform every decision her character makes. Instead of tying up Anna's journey with a neat bow, the novel's resolution is tentative, hopeful, and realistic. Zgheib's lyrical, dream-like style, the perfect match for Anna's alternately foggy and focused thought processes, will resonate with fans of Wally Lamb's and Anne Tyler's novels and Augusten Burroughs' memoirs.--Stephanie Turza Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her powerful debut, Zgheib masterfully chronicles the pain of an anorexic's distorted thinking and intense fear of food in a riveting diarylike structure. Plucked from Paris to St. Louis, former dancer Anna Aubry Roux is 26 years old, married, and in the fight of her life with a severe eating disorder. After fainting in the bathroom and being discovered by her husband, Anna is sent to a residential treatment facility. She is still in denial about her condition, even as she drops to 88 pounds. As she bonds with the other women, including former Olympian hopeful Emm and tortured Ivy League grad Valerie, Anna sees herself in them, and they in her; indeed, it is the residents who show Anna how much she has to live for. Anna's fits and starts toward recovery are realistically and poignantly depicted. The author also adroitly shows how past traumas (for Anna, her brother's death in a car accident and her mother's death by suicide) can manifest in a relentless need for control. This is an impressive, deeply moving debut. 100,000-copy announced first printing. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Anna, a young Frenchwoman, finds herself at a treatment facility in the St. Louis suburbs for those suffering from eating disorders. How did she get here, and how will she survive this grim situation? She had followed her loving husband, Matthias, when he took a new job in America. Already suffering from anorexia, the former ballerina is bored and lonely, and further denial seems to be the answer. Her life starts to spiral downhill, and when her weight reaches a frightening 88 pounds, she becomes a patient at 17 Swann Street. The girls at this facility regard food as the enemy and every bite as a battle, as the counselors firmly insist on their eating a bland but wholesome diet. Some gradually get better; some don't. Anna describes her inner feelings in a poetic voice, and her story is a compelling revelation of what starvation does to the brain. However, readers could have benefitted from learning more about Anna's childhood trauma, only vaguely alluded to here. VERDICT While young women make up the target readership for this gripping story, it will give anyone a clearer understanding of what it's like to look at life (and food) from the viewpoint of someone suffering from this terrible disease. [See Prepub Alert, 8/27/17.]-Leslie -Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A French expat battles anorexia at an in-patient facility in the American Midwest.The plot of Zgheib's debut novel is very simple: Anna, a 26-year-old, checks into a treatment facility for anorexia at the behest of her beloved husband, who cannot continue to pretend she is not starving. It was not always like this: Once, Anna was a ballet dancer in Paris, where she and Matthias exuberantly fell in love. But then Anna got injured and stopped dancing, and Matthias took a job in St. Louis, and she followed, and now here she is in Bedroom 5 at 17 Swann St., amid a crew of other women, in varying states of distress. Some of them will get better. Some of them won't. "You're one of the lucky ones," one of the girls tells her, shortly after her arrival. "You have a reason to survive." This turns out to be true. Over her weeks of treatmenttime is demarcated with medical reports, helpfully summarizing her weight and mental stateAnna fights treatment and then surrenders to it. Most of the novel is concerned with the details of her recovery, which are wrenching, in a quiet sort of way: the agony of eating half a bagel with cream cheese; the guilt over what she's put her family through. We also get flashbacks to her life before illness: childhood walks with her father; eating crepes on her wedding day. There are heavy hints of past traumasa bad boyfriend; a dead brother and mother; a stagnant dance careerbut mercifully, Zgheib doesn't spend much time connecting these too closely to Anna's current state, an acknowledgment that the disease, like Anna, is complicated. And yet the novel's greatest strength is its simplicity. There is no unusually dramatic backstory; Matthias is kind and relentlessly loving; Anna is, in all but her Frenchness, unexceptional. It's a story we've read before; it's moving nonetheless.A nuanced portrait of a woman struggling against herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
