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

The Locked Room

A police investigation during the Covid-19 pandemic--a quest to solve a series of stymying suicides--unearths the past and puts a noted forensic archaeologist and her 11-year-old daughter in grave danger.

Dr. Ruth Galloway is a (fictional) forensic archaeologist--a smart, captivating British heroine created by author Elly Griffiths--who always finds herself embroiled in murder and mystery.

Over the course of 13 novels, this bright, British amateur sleuth and college professor has dealt with discoveries such as child remains (The Crossing Places), unidentified corpses from WWII (The House at Sea’s End) and secret underground tunnels (The Chalk Pit) ... among other life and death dilemmas. She’s traveled to Italy (The Dark Angel) and despite being an avowed atheist, she’s even dealt with aspects of religion (The Woman in Blue). Readers have grown along with Ruth Galloway, seeing her through life changes and challenges that have included romance, motherhood, grief and loss. It’s most fitting, then, that Griffiths has set her latest Ruth Galloway mystery, The Locked Room, (the 14th in the series) during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. 

 

Just as Covid-19 is about to turn the entire world upside-down, Ruth and her 11-year-old daughter, Kate, are suddenly forced into lockdown at Ruth’s old childhood home, a cottage in Norfolk, where Ruth had been trying to tie up unresolved fragments from her late mother’s life. Forced into isolation, mother and daughter are befriended (at a safe distance) by a seemingly kind, nurse neighbor, Zoe, a frontline worker. In the midst of them all sheltering in place, Ruth’s on-again, off-again love interest, DCI Harry Nelson (and his team) enlists Ruth’s help in trying to solve clues from a decades-long investigation of stymying suicides by local women. Amidst the investigation--and limitations imposed by the lockdown--clues from the past, including prior ties to an old pandemic and spooky folklore, weave their way into dark danger that ultimately puts Ruth, Kate--and Zoe, a woman who might not be all she appears to be--deep into hot water.

 

A cast of recurrent, familiar characters and their dramatic personal dilemmas--along with chillingly authentic details of pandemics, past and present--add to the suspense of Griffiths' well-conceived, brilliantly executed cozy that delivers a shocking plot twist.

 

The Locked Room: A Ruth Galloway Mystery Series (Book 14) by Elly Griffiths

Mariner Books, $18.99 paperback, 9780358671398, 384 pages

Publication Date: June 28, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

A hauntingly reflective memoir details the intricacies of mental illness and the bonds of sisterly love and loyalty in this life--and beyond.

Deep, everlasting love, grief and the mysteries of mental illness are undercurrents that propel The Perfect Other, a chilling, moving memoir by Kyleigh Leddy. A graduate of Boston College now in pursuit of her master's in social work, Leddy grapples with the life and loss of her older sister, Kait, a young woman affected by schizophrenia.

 

Leddy has spent a large part of her young life grappling with the sudden and unexplained disappearance of her 22-year-old sister, Kait, last seen on a frigid January night in 2014. Security cameras show that her older sister took a taxi to the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, Pa., ascended to the highest point and then disappeared. It is believed she jumped; however, her body was never recovered. Thus, her whereabouts remains a mystery--one that haunts Leddy and sets her on a course to make sense of the shocking tragedy, both personally and through a more psychologically clinical lens.

 

Through a sensitively drawn, stream-of-conscious narrative--spurred by a "Modern Love" column Leddy published in the New York Times--she stitches together remembered fragments and pivotal scenes from the life she, her mother and father shared with Kait. After sustaining a head injury, Kait started to exhibit concerning erratic behaviors that took inexplicable, unruly--often violent--turns. Leddy's raw search for understanding, meaning and peace grants readers a rare personal glimpse into the universal mysteries of mental illness and the long-lasting traumatic effects it has on those afflicted, as well as those in its orbit.

 

The Perfect Other: A Memoir by Kyleigh Leddy

Mariner Books, $28.99 hardcover, 9780358469346, 304 pages

Publication Date: March 8, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (March 8, 2022), link HERE

To read the longer form of this review as published on Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade (January 7, 2022), link HERE

Dating Tips for the Unemployed

A mosaic of comical short stories about a 35 year-old single, intellectual woman trying to navigate the complexities of life and love.

Crafty comic writer Iris Smyles returns to exploring the life of her fictional anti-hero, Iris, in Dating Tips for the Unemployed. In Smyles's first novel, Iris Has Free Time, character Iris was a young, single New Yorker grappling with life after college and the pitfalls of young adulthood. In the new novel, Iris is now 35 and still single. She's grown older and while still struggling with hard-won wisdom, she continues her witty, self-deprecating and often self-defeating search for a place in the world.

This time around, character Iris--an aspiring writer largely supported economically by her Greek, politically right-leaning family--starts her journey having now completed her second master's degree and feeling that she needs to find a man and get married "before I gain any more weight, before I get too old, before people start to talk." That quest, channeled through Iris's lovably downtrodden, often absent-minded perspective, is not easy to accomplish. In 24 short, eclectic episodes, Iris--a wry observer and keen philosophical thinker--shares stories centered on men, dating, work (and the lack thereof), loneliness, friendship, sex, literature, costume parties, growing older, time travel, insomnia, Greek mythology and the complete series of Rocky movies. A large cast of characters comprised of family, friends, lovers and strangers enhance the very funny details of Iris's rich, authentic urban odyssey.

Smyles delivers another clever, insightful glimpse into the often absurd existence of an intellectual young woman who makes the idea of floundering in life a laudable art form.

Dating Tips for the Unemployed by Iris Smyles

Mariner Books, $15.95 Paperback, 9780544703384, 320 pp

Publication Date: October 27, 2015

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (6/28/16), link HERE