Book Review: "Grief Cottage" by Gail Godwin

There's something to be said about how much I love atmospheric writing and that doesn't have to mean lengthy Victorian-esque descriptions, it can also be emotions and lifestyles being written on. I love it when the author sets out to create an atmosphere, set the mood and then put us into the story as we are - getting us to read into the way the main character's sense of story. It just means that we get to feel what the character is feeling, move the way they're moving and see what they are seeing. That could not be more true for this cross between an eerie story of the past and coming-of-age narrative by Gail Godwin. Grief Cottage is definitely about grief, but also so much more...

The book starts with Marcus' mother dying in a car accident. The car flips over a few times and I'm not going to lie, even that felt atmospheric and emotional in the act. So Marcus is orphaned and has to grieve whilst also being placed with his great aunt Charlotte, a woman who lives an isolated life who paints the landscape she lives in, selling them every now and again. Honestly, the writing in this book is beautiful, it feels slow and burning like you're taking small steps, lightly through the text though the emotions are heavy and they are being attached to you in the same way they are with the main character, Marcus. It's even heavier because he's a child too.

He asks Charlotte what the cottage is all about across the way and she tells him a story of a family that lived there and how it is now called 'grief cottage'. Marcus, being interested - starts to explore his new environment. He seems to also think that Charlotte took him in because she gets a bit of money out of it, but she also seems to be putting the money into him as she wants to pay for him to go to a good school as well. Charlotte tells the tragic story of a hurricane in which a family disappeared. The bodies were never recovered. Thus...grief cottage. Marcus starts to explore and believes he saw the ghost of the boy who once lived there. This mixture of grief and its stages mixed with the sense that Marcus might be experiencing a true haunting and the mysterious background of the story of grief cottage - all of this makes for such an intense and brilliant atmosphere. It is a near-perfect grieving-process story.

Marcus, possibly projecting his grief on to the grief of the cottage, starts obsessing over the identity of the ghost boy - he also joins a local effort to protect sea turtle eggs (again, maybe as a result of his grief). The struggle for survival and wanting to be seen as a person is very strong in the main character's mind, but as he starts to uncover what happened, he also starts to uncover things about his own past and his own family, especially the father he never knew. The novel jumps back and forth in time but never loses that great sense of atmosphere that contains itself within the central mystery of the story. I loved the writing of this book even though I do think sometimes that there were more characters than were necessary. Be that as it may, the writing makes up for it. Most of the book, whether in the present or the future, deals with the sense of grief that Marcus is dealing with and how that manifests in several different ways over the course of Marcus' life.

So as you can probably tell, I really enjoyed this book. Though I would not call it a horror novel it does contain elements that relate more to the Victorian idea of a ghost story even though it is set in America. The author definitely has done some research on the stages of grief and the reader can start to identify them as they read along. Even though this book may not be for everyone, I definitely think it was for me. Be that as it may Amazon, I would not have put it in the horror section of the books category.