“A smart, funny, wonderful book that will contain truth for every reader.”

The suppression (and awakening) of many different appetites and hungers is the theme of this edgy and intense first novel whose protagonist is a 25-year-old anorexic.The first-person narration is expressive without being wordy, and Alice's voice--the dry wit, the outsider's observations--adds a level of credibility to this chronicle of women who are female versions of Kafka's hunger artist: they're anorexic because they haven't yet tasted a food they like. The story of how Alice finds that food and renounces her feeling of emptiness is convincing and, in the end, quite moving, proving Grant a writer in cool command of her talent.

"[A] tart and edgy first novel . . . A rarity--an examination of a twenty-five-year-old woman's peculiar inner life, wrapped in a sharp comedy of manners."