This book reminds me strongly of the Peg Bracken book I reviewed several months ago (A Window Over the Sink), the one I thought was so intelligently amusing it left authors such as Erma Bombeck in a cloud of dust. You certainly CAN tell a book by its cover and here's an excellent example: this one pictures a tweed coat with a pink diaper pin securing a name-tag. That's exactly the way the book is: a fatherly man talking affectionately and in a way that is both modest and proud about his daughters. It's charming. It's funny. It's interesting. I loved it.

The Hunger Moon, by Suzanne Matson (1997)

For those of you who won't read it otherwise, I'll give away the information that the baby is perfectly safe and everything turns out okay in the end. This is one of those different women, different lives kinds of books: each chapter is titled with the name of one of three women, and each woman is dealing with a Woman Problem: widowhood, eating disorder, single motherhood. All through the book I had this ominous feeling that Something Bad was about to happen, but although some bad things do indeed happen, they're not as bad as I was expecting. The author is a poet and I think this comes through---though again, not as bad as I was expecting: she seems to use her poetry background to make her writing concise and beautiful, rather than using it to make her writing flowery and "deep" (which is not to say that the occasional wisp of flowery/deep doesn't float by). The characters in the book are well-rounded and well-described; I particularly enjoyed the description of Marjorie, a woman who gives backhanded compliments. Details are breathtakingly perfect: not so many that you're drowning in unnecessary or boring information, but enough to pin down the exact details you need to understand the character in a few sentences so the plot can continue moving forward instead of stalling for extended explanations. I'd recommend this book highly, though perhaps most strongly to women: the men I read excerpts to rolled their eyes and used words like "sissy" and "girly."