Frannie, Jillian Medoff's 26-year-old New York heroine, knows she's a screwed-up mess. She's just moved back in with her parents, she can't hold a job, and worst of all, she's obsessed with food and her weight. She's been in Weight Watchers more than half her life; her mother is a compulsive calorie counter; and the only way she relates to other females is through eating and shared guilt. When her anorexic sister commits suicide, Frannie is forced to go through a uniquely modern middle-class existential trauma—reevaluating exactly how much of her own problem is real and how much of it is invented excuses. Medoff does a admirable job of characterization with Frannie, an occasionally shallow person capable of manipulating her friends, enjoying the minor cruelties she performs on her parents, and pronouncing "whatever" as two separate words. Her food fixation is allowed to run amok, providing a subtext for Frannie's other neuroses that is by turns ridiculous and grim. In the end, Hunger Point is an exploration of coming to terms with adulthood and one's appetites, whether for food or love. It might not be anything new, but it's admirably candid, and it makes for an fine first novel.