-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:Filled with laugh-out-loud humor, struggles, triumphs, and plenty of midnight trips to the fridge, Good Grief is a funny, wise, and heartbreakingly poignant novel from one of fiction's freshest and most exciting new voices.
"The funny thing about rock bottom is there's stuff underneath it. You think, This is it: I'm at the bottom now. It's all uphill from here! Then you discover the escalator goes down one more floor to another level of bargain basement junk."
GOOD GRIEF
In an age in which women are expected to be high achievers, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton desperately wants to be a good widow--a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, Sophie is more of a Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with cartons of ice cream for breakfast, breaking down in the produce section at the supermarket, showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers--soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, her house, and her waistline.
Desperate to reinvent her life, Sophie moves to Ashland, Oregon. But instead of the way women starting over are depicted in the movies--with heroines instantly being swept off their feet by Sam Shepard kinds of guys--Sophie finds herself in the middle of Lucy-and-Ethel madcap adventures with a darkly comic edge involving a thirteen-year-old with a fascination with fire and an alarmingly handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with--yet.
Filled with laugh-out-loud humor, struggles, triumphs, and plenty of midnight trips to the fridge, Good Grief is a funny, wise, and heartbreakingly poignant novel from one of fiction's freshest and most exciting new voices.
An enjoyable read, even though it did seem a little incredible that someone could go from the bottomless despair of grief to the heights of competence, and even happiness, in the timescale of the book..continued
Full Review
(439 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Elisabeth Kubler Ross was born in 1926 in Zurich, Switzerland and died of natural causes in 2004 in Arizona. Her ground breaking and bestselling book, On Death and Dying, (1969) did much to change the treatment of terminally ill patients. She was compelled to write it while working as a doctor in hospitals in New York, Colorado and Chicago, where she was appalled by the standard treatment for dying patients: 'They were shunned and abused; nobody was honest with them.'
Ross' five psychological stages of grief
Denial - At first, we tend to deny the loss has taken place, and may withdraw from our usual social contacts.
Anger - The grieving person may then be furious at the person who inflicted the hurt, or at the world, for letting it ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Good Grief, try these:
The Garden of Small Beginnings
by Abbi Waxman
Published 2017
Not since Good Grief has a book about a young widow been so poignant, funny, original, and utterly believable. A compelling debut novel about loss.
by Leslie Pietrzyk
Published 2017
Winner of the 2015 Pitt Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: The power to see, to sense, and to say. ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Billie Letts, author of Where The Heart Is
Lolly Winston had me from page one, really from the first paragraph...
