My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

She tried the front door, expecting it to be unlocked for some reason, but found that they’d locked up before leaving. Seems silly to think about securing a house when the thing you’d most want to secure it against already happened. That’s like coming in from a bad storm and putting on a rain coat.

A little known thing about crime scenes, which Dale had not been aware of previously herself, is that once the police are done asking questions, and stomping around photographing things, marking things of interest to test or dust for prints, they leave you with the mess. Anytime you hear of a neighborhood shooting, or a suicide, or an arson, just picture people, on the darkest days of their lives, having to clean up all that horror.

That’s a thing that you don’t fully realize, until you’ve lost someone very close to you. It’s a thing that’s almost impossible to even describe. The away-ness of death. The gone-ness of it? It’s otherworldly. Ghostly, as a whole. like you yourself are a little less part of the living, just for having taken in the cold loss that it leaves behind.

My Review:

 

Other than a rather gruesome scene at the beginning and the first few chapters dealing with the aftermath, the storylines are mainly one woman’s inner musings and personal struggle with grief. While there were glimmers of keen insights and her profoundly visceral reactions to touchstones, the vast majority of the writing ground down into a rather tedious recitation of the minutiae of her deep depression as her life fell apart. I was invested in the first third of the book and felt the potential, but not being a fan of constant angst, I found the remainder to be rather dull while I kept waiting for something to spark. Alas, the last two-thirds of the book failed to engage.