The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls - by Anissa Gray

When Althea and Proctor Cochran are arrested on food-stamp fraud, and for skimming money from the fundraising charities they organized, their teen aged twin daughters, Kim and Baby Vi, are left in the care of Althea's sister Lillian. Lillian also cares for her deceased ex-husband's grandmother. Additionally, she must negotiate the relationships she has with her other siblings (Joe and Viola).

There are three types of libraries mentioned in this work: prison, public, and home. Each appears to  represent both a place of hope and of harsh reality.

Proctor uses the prison library to verify that there is a women's prison in West Virginia, when he is told he could potentially end up at a men's facility in Virginia. He writes to his wife

I was talking to our friend the other day, and he was naming off a couple of possibilities. He mentioned a prison out there in Virginia...He was going on about how he heard it was easy time out there in the federal system and I said, man, I don't know what "easy time" is. He got me and tried to make up for it by telling me about a ladies' prison out in West Virginia, and he said wouldn't it be nice if Althea ended up there?...And you know what? For a minute, your boy was happy, just imagining it. I even went to the library and looked it up. And there it was, West Virginia with what looked like a little arm, snuggled up there with Virginia. Then, it hit me: This is what it's come down to...I can't believe that this is the best we can hope for...

Althea's fellow inmate Mercedes describes a favorite teacher (Ms. Peterson) she had growing up who would stop by the house when I didn't make it to school. "And she started taking me to the library and everything like that...She took me to my first Disney movie...The Fox and the Hound."  Ms. Peterson's encouragement led Mercedes to aspire to a career drawing for Disney. But ultimately, Mercedes determines that "Some of us just got Kick Me signs tacked to our backs straight outta the womb."

When Kim runs away from Lillian's home there are a number of leads, and people reporting having seen her, including a report of

a girl sleeping in the library. From the description, Hop thought it could have been her, but when he got there whoever it was was gone.

Lillian renovated the family home following her father's death, creating a library where the living room used to be. A place "enveloped in warmth" where "orange flames writhe and rise in the stacked stone fireplace..." the warmth is deceptive to Viola, who would have left the room exactly as it was had it been up to her. She would rather remember the space as it was when he mother hosted Tupperware parties, a memory that

lives in a burst of color: green plastic bowls, pink plastic pitchers, orange plastic cups; gold couch, gold chains, gold charms; Mama's white dress; her lotioned, light brown skin.

I often see libraries in novels representing some kind of promise. It seems that these all do, too, but that the promise remains unfulfilled.