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"In real life, death is not very exciting at all. Each time, each time, you see the struggle happening in the body. None of the bodies want to die, all of the bodies are being forced to give up their hold on life through shock or exhaustion. It's not very exciting, when you can't intervene, can't be a superhero come to save the day. We start to realize life gets overwhelmed by death every single time."The blurb details Grievers as "the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer fu...
I was a little underwhelmed with this book, felt like i was waiting for the plot to take off throughout. Which is maybe the point: grief is a place we can feel stuck, doesn't always have an arc or resolution. I think the premise is interesting and i can see how this book honors the history of Detroit (and particularly resistance movements birthed out of Detroit).
A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Edelweiss. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.
4.5 stars.A novella trilogy... definitely want to read the next one.
I love amb, and I also wanted more from this book. Really interesting premise and I did enjoy the story - but I wanted more depth.
It might sound odd but what I enjoyed the most about this book were the moments of dark humor and the description of dreams. This is a world of apocalypse where the power and water and the internet seem to stay intact. In that way it feels the most like allegory. This is a survival text, and the thing we are learning to surviving is the overwhelming urge to give up the fight.
A bizarre illness strikes Dune’s mother, Kama, mid-sentence, leaving her frozen and inanimate, though still breathing for some few weeks longer. The doctors have no idea what this is, and Dune takes Kama home to die, eventually cremating her formerly impassioned and vibrant Black mother. Her mother who, along with her Asian American father, worked for a variety of social justice causes. Dune is left in pieces with her grief. Only her ailing grandmother, who lives with her, keeps Dune up and movi...
This book was incredibly sad and takes an unflinching look at a city plagued by grief, loneliness, despair, poverty, gentrification, hopelessness and then the plague actually hits and the most vulnerable are left behind to fend for themselves as they die. “Who do you call to bury your dead when you have no money?”Wow, this book. It's not an easy read and it's not supposed to be but it's an important one. The main character, Dune, is witness to the despair overtaking her city but she stays when o...
My Mom died unexpectedly while I was reading this book. I showed it to her when I bought it and she told me she wanted to read it after me. Since she died I've collected and examined all her loose threads, the unfinished projects, all the unrealized dreaming, and this one has haunted me in a way I can't explain. I set the book aside, unable to touch it for months. Today it hurt more the way it sat there unfinished than it did to pick up so I finally did, and read every word. adrienne paints a pi...
“When you lose enough people, you stop getting as close to the new ones who come into your life…Things used to be so great, so pure, so just, so perfect. We look back and excavate the most beautiful versions of our histories.”So I have this thing that when I visit an independent bookstore for the very first time, I HAVE to purchase a book from that store. When I visited Epilogue Books —this cute bookstore/café with a Frida Kahlo mural— for the first time in Chapel Hill, NC a few months ago, I pu...
This isn't an easy book to review. It somehow feels wrong to say I enjoyed something that was just so damn sad! A mysterious illness known as H-8 is killing the people of Detroit. Attacking out of nowhere and leaving its victims in an unresponsive state, with no chance of recovery. The city is under quarantine but the morgues and graveyards continue to fill. Dune watched her mother die. Her mother, patient zero. I loved Dunes character. Despite everything that was going on in her own home and ar...
I got this book for a few reasons. First, because adrienne maree brown wrote it. In her other books, which I haven't read, I like her focus on pleasure and loyalty in movement spaces, like Big M movement, I guess, and while I'm not ready to read a non-fiction book about movement, I was open to reading a movement writer writing about fictional, future, movement-adjacent things. Second, because the cover is all black and white and and grey, which I'm into. Third, because it offered another opportu...
You wouldn’t think a book about a pandemic is what you’d want to read right now. But please, please read this book. I know I will come back to it multiple times, as I keep exploring how to process personal and communal grief. It is so beautiful. So powerful. Give yourself the gift of reading this 💜
I loved this. Review soon.
I think the main point was to have a disconnected narrator, but hoping for next in series to take it a bit farther
Slow, but not in a boring way, more like a savoring it way. Turns out amb is a skilled fiction writer! She personifies Grace Lee Boggs in one of the characters which was a precious, intimate gift. A beautiful raw real aspirational picture of grief.
Please let this be the start of a series from amb!!!!
I received a copy of this book directly from the author/publisher in exchange for an honest review. I couldn't get into this book. The cover was haunting, and the synopsis was intriguing, but when it got down to it, the writing lacked soul. The narrative voice was a weird, detached, and emotionless drone with an uncomfortably graphic description of the world, but lacking any sort of emotion or poetry. The narrative did not flow - at all - it was like trying to translate a staccato and alien garb...
An only-slightly hyperbolic embodiment of intergenerational trauma. Heavy. “But now she looked in the mirror, wondering if Kama’s loving miscegenation had produced a child who wasn’t Black enough to die with her people” (100).“Dune wondered if the source of destruction mattered once you could build structures of skeletons” (112).“Crazy just means honest sometimes” (155).“Grief was an amalgamation of absence narratives…” (174).
adrienne maree brown is one of the great heirs to the Octavia Butler vision and tradition. This novel (so looking forward to more in this Black Dawn Series!) brings the speculative fiction focus in closely to the present times, exploring a mysterious disease originating (apparently) in Detroit and affecting (apparently) only African Americans. The title gives the important tie-in to some of what we're experiencing with COVID-19: what forms can/do/should the act of grieving the loss of loved ones...