Hunger Point : A Novel

Unfortunately, until women stop mistaking food for love and thinness for perfection, stories such as this one will need to be told. Equally unfortunately, the telling is flawed despite the story's importance. Narrator Frannie Hunter recounts the disturbing story of her sister's anorexia and suicide, her parent's broken marriage, and her own obsession with food and men. Although confronting enough conflict to fill a dysfunctional family circus, Frannie most often reacts by sleeping, whining, or crying?all understandable psychological responses but ones that do nothing for the dramatic tension of the novel. Striving for realism, Medoff manages only to be mundane. A more dynamic heroine would have focused an otherwise commendable first novel.?Yvette Weller Olson, City Univ. Lib., Seattle

This ambitious, ribald, and extremely honest first novel attempts to unravel the familial and social pressures that drive two sisters into a life of serious food abuse. One survives, the other doesn't. Frannie, though she does not succumb completely to anorexia, is near the breaking point, and Hunger Point takes us along on her painful and often funny emotional odyssey of rebirth, detailed with her family's embattled love and her own self-loathing. Food is not the only matter of the body that is treated brilliantly; the author's soul-baring depiction of both the miseries and pleasures of sex from a woman's point of view is unforgettable and occasionally terrifying. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.