Good Grief

A captivating, impeccably rich study about the many ways companion animals enrich lives and how people mourn and grieve their loss. 

 

“When we open our hearts to animals, death is the inevitable price,” writes E.B. Bartels, a former bookseller at Newtonville Books, Mass. Good Grief, her impeccably researched first book, offers deeply personal stories about the many ways companion animals enrich lives and how animal lovers must ultimately cope with the pain of their loss.

 

Having a pet is a voluntary choice, and mourning pets is nothing new. Bartels states, “…67 percent of American households, 84.9 million homes, own ‘some sort of pet’…despite the inevitable loss that comes with that relationship, the ways people grieve a dead pet aren’t always taken seriously.” Bartels, a life-long and devout animal lover, has grappled with this predicament since she was a child. Her father loved animals, but her mother claimed she was “violently allergic” to “anything with fur, feathers, or hair.” That left young, animal-loving Bartels to cultivate fresh water fish in table-top aquariums. When “trouble in (fish) paradise” began and occupants were found floating in the tank and/or were swallowed up by larger fish, Bartels became intrigued by the nature of loss and grief. Starting in kindergarten, she developed something of a “pet aftercare industry,” where she assisted with animal funerals and burials with peers at school. 

 

This in-depth, richly informative narrative is replete with down-to-earth stories from Bartels herself and those of ordinary pet lovers, pet care professionals, celebrities and historians. The pivotal roles pet birds, reptiles, rodents, horses, dogs and cats have played in personal lives--and how they are ultimately grieved and remembered--are interspersed among fascinating historical facts: The Egyptians treasured the intimacy offered by pets and exotic animals and were known to bury them alongside humans in the same sarcophagi. The Summum community, a contemporary religious group in Utah, mummifies--preserves, in whole--their beloved animal companions. Popular icon, Barbra Streisand was so devastated by the loss of her beloved 14-year-old dog, Samantha, that she had her cloned in order to keep “some part of her alive.” Bartels thoroughly examines these and many other topics including euthanasia, taxidermy, ideas about reincarnation, pet cemeteries and more.

 

Readers, like Bartels, who long to consciously comprehend the pet-human bond--why people care so much for their pets, in life and in death, and what makes the bond so worthwhile and why--will be educated, greatly enriched and find much to reflect upon.

 

Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels

Mariner Books (Harper Collins Publishers), $27.99 hardcover, 272 pages, 9780358212331

Publication Date: August 2, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (May 3, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 1, 2022), link HERE

Cat Brushing

Deeply resonant, eloquently rendered short stories about women who change and grow with enlightenment amidst the twilight of their lives.

Octogenarian Jane Campbell may be “new” to the publishing industry, but her first book, Cat Brushing, is refreshingly accomplished. The thirteen exquisitely drawn short stories in the collection are woven with wit and bold enlightenment. Each meticulously crafted gem focuses on the lives of aging women who grapple with their shrinking places in the world while coming to terms with feelings and failings, choices and losses.

 

Longing, need and sensuality surprise: A woman who “never put a foot over the line,” lives out her days in a care facility. Having grown distant from her self-interested adult children, the woman experiences an unexpected awakening amidst the gentle touch of her attentive manicurist. A similar theme infuses the tender story of one writerly woman’s life and a sense of loneliness that persists throughout marriages, affairs and motherhood. When she settles alone in a small village later ravaged by a violent storm, she takes in a displaced neighbor whose house is destroyed. The two disparate souls form a bond deeper than either could have imagined.

 

Reflective pleasures abound in the title story, where a woman “judged too old to live alone,” moves in with her son and his younger wife. Feeling “dispossessed… of control and elegance,” the woman and her Siamese cat become fellow inmates. The cat arouses charms and wiles the woman once had in abundance—maybe all is not lost?

 

Many stories deal with women forced to give up rights, respect and desires: An older woman takes a fall that sets in motion a series of events that drag her back to the past and a questionable issue of adoption. A simple lunch resurrects a memory of parental love that suddenly transforms, through the prism of retrospect, into control. A chance meeting on a train depicts the effect of consequential choices. Revenge tastes sweet when an unassuming neighbor privy to a long-suffering, powerless wife and her ogre husband cleverly settles a score.

Aspects of regret, mourning, fantasies, and lost love infuse these eloquently rendered, skillfully plotted stories that pack a wallop. “Ageing is often represented as an accumulation, of disease, of discomforts, of wrinkles,” says the narrator of the title story. However, in these wholly original, late-in-life stories crafted by Jane Campbell, the limitations incurred by aging ultimately become surprising sources of wisdom and empowered liberation.

 

Cat Brushing by Jane Campbell

Grove Press/Grove Atlantic, $26.00 hardcover, 256 pages, 9780802160027

Publication Date: August 9, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND link HERE

 

NOTE: To read this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (June 20, 2022 ), link HERE

 

NOTE: To read a condensed version of this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (August 12, 2022), link HERE