Some good books about grieving

Recently, I was able to read a pre-publication copy of a book about grieving by Amanda Held Opelt, and I’m happy to share my thoughts about it here. Especially since Amazon in its wisdom wouldn’t let me post my review because they’d noticed “unusual activity” on the book. (Ah, yes, a strong pre-marketing campaign by the publisher, God forbid. I’m almost glad to see this happens to traditional publishers as well as self-publishers.)

Anyway, as I noted in my longer Goodreads review,

This is an interesting exploration of grief and the rituals associated by … the surviving sister of Rachel Held Evans, the wonderful Christian writer who died tragically young when her case of the flu turned deadly. Opelt has also suffered miscarriages and worked in war and disaster zones around the world, so she’s also familiar with loss in other ways.

If you are a Christian (perhaps especially someone in a liturgical tradition), you may take great comfort in this candid discussion of grieving. If you’re not, you may still find it hopeful and moving, but the religious content may be a bit much for you.

…Each chapter devotes itself to a tradition, one that we carry on today or one that we have lost or that is specific to various cultures 0r times (examples include keening, covering the mirrors, telling the bees, etc.). Sometimes it’s a bit academic; other times it’s heart wrenching to read about Opelt’s actual experiences with actual losses. It’s probably not a book to read all at once, given the subject matter, but to work through over a period of time.

Reading it reminded me of some other books I’ve read on the topic. My favorite is A GRIEF OBSERVED, by C.S. Lewis. I have to admit a lot of Lewis’s popular theology books, like MERE CHRISTIANITY, don’t do much for me. They strike me as glib and smug and full of arguments by analogy.

But in A GRIEF OBSERVED, all that is torn away in favor of telling the painful truth about a devastating loss and what it does to Lewis’s relationship with God. You get to really watch the man wrestle with darkness, and you can’t help but be moved by it. (The movie SHADOWLANDS does a good job of representing this on the screen, though it’s more about the whole relationship.)

A very nontraditional book on the subject, one that claims it is fiction, although I have my doubts, is NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS, by Patricia Lockwood. As noted in my longer Goodreads review:

At first, with this book, I thought I was reading extremely disjointed but often funny, sometimes just glib takes on the internet, here called “the portal.”

…Eventually, however, a heartbreaking and heartwarming story of hope and loss and family and humanity emerged. Ultimately, I found it very moving. Recommended if you can cope with a nontraditionally-told story that is very much grounded in (and commenting on) our time.

Grief for people and also for a community or a way of life is the undercurrent in the beautifully written THE HIRED MAN by Aminatta Forna. It’s about a bleak topic, yet retains a stubborn hope. Also quoting from my Goodreads review:

A remarkable novel about war and its aftereffects, set in an inland part of Croatia that was once part of Yugoslavia and saw some shelling and some genocide. And yet life goes on, until an English family blunders onto the scene years later and unknowingly sparks memories neither the town nor our narrator (their handyman and neighbor), nor the guiltiest parties still present necessarily want to relive. There’s joy but also rising tension.

If by any chance you’re as much of a fan of Tim Farrington as I am, you might also want to check out his self-published novel SLOW WORK (affiliate link), about a man who carves grave stones. I think it is beautiful, if not terribly commercial.

Far more commercial is the recent novel, REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES (affiliate link) by Shelby Van Pelt, a warm small town novel about enduring grief, recovering family, and redeeming old losses. Also, there’s an octopus, and it’s wonderful.

So, any recommendations from you? I’d love to hear them.

 

Tim Farrington reviews “The Awful Mess” … and I freak out

Cover for The Awful Mess: A Love StoryI recently received an email with a lovely review of “The Awful Mess” from one of my favorite authors, Tim Farrington, who wrote the “The Monk Downstairs” — a book I love so much that I’ve gifted and loaned it repeatedly and put it on my short list of books I recommend to anyone.

And I’ve just been holding onto this review and reading it now and then — hoarding it, really. Not only because it is from Tim, taking my novel seriously, but also because he compares my writing to the work of my favorite author of all time, Jane Austen.

(Insert happy girly scream here.)

See, I was just really hoping he’d like it. I was really hoping for a nice blurb I could use to sell the book. Instead, I got more validation than I’d ever dreamed of. I feel as if I’ve had hands laid on me and I’ve been welcomed into the abbey.

But that’s also a little freaky. As a self-published author, I expected to skulk around the outside of the abbey completely unnoticed for years. Part of me is not sure I really want to take the work that seriously. Except that, of course, I do, or I wouldn’t have published it in the first place.

So I feel incredibly grateful and blessed to have received this gift. This validation.

I’m still strangely reluctant to share it, though, even as I work on this blog post. I shared it with my parents before I drafted this, just to try to loosen up. (Dad congratulated me and told me it made a nice distraction to read it on his iPad during the painful work being done on his ingrown toenails. Thanks for grounding me, Dad.)

Is this because of the whole women-shouldn’t-brag thing? A little fear of genuine sheer hubris? Or am I afraid that this will somehow happen to it:

But taking the work seriously means I have to try to sell these books rather than just write them, the idea being to get people to actually read them, so… here is Tim’s review:

I finished “The Awful Mess” with that wonderful/melancholy sense you get finishing a good book, of a kind joy mixed with sadness that it was over. It is such a lovely novel, in the classic way, with interesting, exquisitely human characters deftly drawn and fascinating in all their particularity, and a story that keeps the pages turning. Despite the comic recurrent note from the characters, that “This isn’t The Scarlet Letter, after all!” this is in fact a book in lovely dialogue with Hawthorne’s story, a New England story of a fiercely independent heroine struggling for a life worthy of aspirations, and her entwinement, in a small town, with a minister of the Lord, among others; and so a story of conscience, passion, and hypocrisy, of souls tested not only the fire of moral truths but in the glaring but often unilluminating light of a tiny community’s gossip, prejudices, and presumptions.

Mary Bellamy is wonderfully contemporary, and utterly sympathetic character, and her growth in both knowledge and self-knowledge throughout the book gives us some of the novel’s most satisfying substance. As a self-described “heathen” with a sharp mind, a good heart, and a wicked sense of humor, she also acts as a sort of acid test for the varieties of faith she encounters, and when she falls by the wayside to a violent catastrophe, it is through her eyes that we see the parable of the Good Samaritan enacted in fresh contemporary garb, with vivid and specific contemporary characters. And Mary herself, through her struggles, comes to see the real difference between the sheep and the goats: there is bathwater aplenty in this unsparing look at human piety and human self-delusion, but there is a baby as well, and a lovely awareness of that real heart of humanity is one of the many things that make the novel so completely satisfying.

It puts me in mind of Jane Austen, the moral mathematics here, that almost algebraic Austenesque precision in the characters ultimately reaping what they sow, and paying to the last farthing, is so strong and rings so exquisitely true in every case.

It’s wonderful, in short! It renews me as a reader, to enjoy a book so much; and as a writer, see it done so well.

What more could a writer ask for, right? A glowing review of “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire”? (He did that too!!!) Maybe this is all just more writing-happiness than I can handle in short order. But it’s also wonderful.

Today I’m off to Florida. I hope to check out a locale or two from the next book as well as see Mom and Dad and his toes. I’ll probably be back in two weeks to share my thoughts about that — well, not the toes. I don’t write horror.

The old standbys — books I will recommend to anyone

Choosing books for people can be a lot like choosing art for people. It’s fairly hit-or-miss trying to find something that is exactly to their taste.

But I get asked for book recommendations fairly often, and I have a few standbys that I’ll mention to just about anyone because I am almost certain they will be enjoyed.

I’m sure you have some, too, including some I’ll miss here, so feel free to share them in a comment! (For example, I still haven’t yet read Lonesome Dove or Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Both are on my shelf, waiting in my loooooong queue of Books Not Read Yet.)

But the books I have read — and recommend even to people I don’t know well — are these:

Cover of I Capture the CastleI Capture the Castle 

Young Cassandra wants to be a writer and thus can see the romance of living in a derelict castle because her father’s writing block is impoverishing them all. Then new neighbors move in, and life gets even more romantically interesting.

The summary may not sound like much, but this is simply one of the most charming books I’ve ever read. It will make you smile and it will make you laugh, and you will just hate to get to the end of it and have to let these characters go.


GuernseyCoverThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The only problem with always wanting to recommend this book is that I can never remember the title correctly. It’s an epistolary novel (i.e. told in letters) that gives us a peek at a close-knit community on the island of Guernsey (off the coast of the UK) during German occupation in World War II.

There’s slow-building romance, hunger, danger, comedy, and lots and lots of charm. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t enjoy this book.


Cover of The Monk DownstairsThe Monk Downstairs

Okay, I’ll admit that this one may annoy people who are committed atheists OR people who are really piously Christian, but most others should enjoy the slow romance of tired single mom Rebecca, working hard to keep her life together, and runaway monk Michael, who’s flipping burgers at a McDonalds and living in her downstairs apartment.

I include it because if you’re here I assume you found some enjoyment in The Awful Mess, and because I just love this combination of romance, theology, and comedy.


And that’s it for this week. It’s actually harder to pick out books I’d expect everyone to love than I thought. Of course, there are many others I might recommend to someone who enjoys romance and can cope with science fiction elements (The Time Traveler’s Wife) or can handle a sad ending (Little Bee) or doesn’t mind literary prose (Housekeeping), or is already familiar enough with British classics to appreciate a spoof (Cold Comfort Farm).

In fact, as I wrote this, I kept coming up with subcategories:

  • Books for people who love Jane Austen
  • Books for Episcopalians, or at least progressive Christians
  • Books for people who appreciate literary prose
  • Books for people who appreciate a tragic ending
  • Wonderful memoirs
  • Books about writers and writing
  • Books for people who enjoy British comedy
  • Books for people who enjoy American comedy
  • Books that will introduce you to Southern literature

So, I have plenty to write about in the future, if I go in that direction. Feel free to let me know what categories you’d be most interested in. (And if nobody’s interested, I guess that’s good to know, too. Ha!)

I’m also opening this spot to occasional guest posts from other writers who would like to write a “Showing some love to ____________” blog post about a favorite (preferably not already incredibly popular) writer’s work, or something else you love that would be of interest to the kind of readers and writers who are likely to be found here. (And yes, of course, you can plug your own book at the same time.) So if you’d like to take part in that, just let me know through the contact form or below.

Happy reading!

P.S. I’d still love your vote for The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire for 2015 Readers’ Choice Award in contemporary/literary/general fiction at BigAl’s Books and Pals. Voting closes March 28, US Mountain Time. While you’re there, check out the fine nominated indie fiction and nonfiction across a whole bunch of categories.