The Many Shades of Grief

While the reader learns details of Greta’s life through flashbacks, the book is concerned with grappling with the fact of her death and the way it impacted those who loved her, not with recording the details of her short life. Accordingly, the story opens in the moments following Greta's accident and deals primarily with Jayson’s grappling with the fact of Greta’s sudden death. Greene considers grief from many angles and adeptly chronicles how it feels and how it can be transformed in different settings, be they public or private, clinical or mystical. The most notable conclusion from the discussion of grief through these various lenses is the degree to which it is more of an umbrella category than specific state of being, sheltering a multitude of emotions, some of which can even be contradictory. “Grief on this level,” Greene writes of...