Loss and Grief

The author uses Greta’s mother’s death as the narrative impetus for her thematic explorations concerning loss and grief. At the novel’s start, Greta is reluctant to join her Conrad on his Alaskan cruise because of her own “feeling of being adrift” in the wake of Helen’s passing (3). What Greta fails to imagine, however, is that her father has also been unmoored by Helen’s death. In turn, she fails to imagine the ways in which she and her father might move towards healing together, rather than allowing their shared loss to widen the preexisting division between them.

Over the course of Greta’s seven days on board the cruise ship Escape, her character encounters a litany of individuals and experiences which challenge her to acknowledge the depth of her grief and how her loss has impacted her understanding of herself...