Good Grief: A Bookreport by Kathleen O'Reilly

I just finished Good Grief by Lolly Winston and thought it was really well-done. Here's the synopsis from Amazon (you can tell I suck at synopsis, can't you?):

Some widows face their loss with denial. Sophie Stanton's reaction is one of pure bafflement. "How can I be a widow?" Sophie asks at the opening of Lolly Winston's sweet debut novel, Good Grief. "I'm only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married." Sophie's young widowhood forces her to do all kinds of crazy things--drive her car through her garage door, for instance. That's on one of the rare occasions when she bothers to get out of bed. The Christmas season especially terrifies her: "I must write a memo to the Minister of Happier Days requesting that the holidays be cancelled this year." But widowhood also forces her to do something very sane. After the death of her computer programmer husband, she reexamines her life as a public relations agent in money-obsessed Silicon Valley. Sophie decides to ease her grief, or at least her loneliness, by moving in with her best friend Ruth in Ashland, Oregon. But it's her difficult relationship with psycho teen punker Crystal, to whom she becomes a Big Sister, that mysteriously brings her at least a few steps out of her grief. Winston allows Sophie life after widowhood: The novel almost indiscernibly turns into a gentle romantic comedy and a quirky portrait of life in an artsy small town.

I've heard good things about the book, and was captivated by the pink bunny slippers on the cover (who says covers don't sell books?). The book has a fabulous detail of life quality to it, that makes Sophie very much alive, and the author does a wonderful joy of cataloging Sophie's grief and the emotions that she feels. Sophie is a strong heroine, very giving, very healing, very resourceful, and she adopts strays at will.

The idea of facing grief with humor, one of the sharpest weapons in the emotional armor, is a great one, and the author pens some very dark humor at the beginning. We've all gone through the loss of a loved one, and the author captures the pain of losing someone you love very unexpectedly through her marvelous use of details and description:

"I think of the white-haired lady in the grief group whose husband drove her everywhere. I picture them in a Chevy Impala driving forty-five on the freeway, two cottony heads peering over the dashboard."

I had two quibbles with this book: one, everything was SO neatly tied up. There are some very dark emotional moments in the first few chapters and those disappeared as soon as she met a new man. If this had been anything but a book about a woman trying to cope with the loss of a husband, I'd have forgiven this one, heck, it'd be a romance. But sometimes the heroine should end up without a man. Is that a spoiler? Sue me. The book's been out a while.

My only other quibble is the excessive similes at the beginning. Now, like a reader needing that first cup of coffee in the morning, I like similes. They can flavor a story, the extra cinnamon and spice that can give a book an extra kick, like Jack Daniels mixed with Coke. However, just like mixing cinnamon and spice and Jack Daniels and coke, they can take you out of a story faster than a T-Bird on the I-10, cruising through Louisiana at 2am, when you know the helicopters aren't buzzing around to capture you on film.

To be fair to Ms. Winston, this disappears after the first 1/3 of the book, and we're back to a respectful rate of simile.

The book is truly excellent, a great summer read. It's not a huge hanky book, so feel free to read while commuting. Highly recommended. I scavaged around Ms. Winston's website to figure out what was next, but no hints are forthcoming. We'll just have to wait and see, but I'll be checking that one out, too...