Grievers by adrienne maree brown wasn’t much on my radar at all going into this year, but a couple Redditors were consistently singing the praises of both it and its sequel, and I needed a pandemic novel for my Bingo board, so with apologies to TBR items like Doomsday Book, Station Eleven, and How High We Go in the Dark, I decided to give brown’s short novel a try.
Grievers takes place in contemporary Detroit and opens with the main character burning the body of her mother, who had taken ill without warning at the very start of a mysterious and deadly plague that seemingly only affects the city’s Black residents. Without doubt, the lead has plenty of questions, but without many ways to find answers, the story mostly consists in her trying to survive, to care for her elderly grandmother, and to take her own small steps toward memorializing all that the disease is taking from her city.
The result is a quiet novel without a lot of overarching plot or narrative momentum. That’s not necessarily a criticism, just a fact. While there are obstacles to survival, they’re never the sort that puts the reader in the “just one more page” mindset, and the project of memorializing doesn’t drive the story forward in the same way that a search for answers might.
Instead, Grievers is for fans of quieter, more meditative stories that explore very human themes—primarily, in this case, grief, although the story also touches on racism, gentrification, disaster relief, political organizing, and other topics. The prose is lovely, and there are some individual passages that truly jump off the page. Take, for instance:
[N]otifications were full of people sending “prayers and love” to her, or her family, or to the city of Detroit. At some point, these trite condolences had replaced the act of grieving, of actually feeling a wave of sadness. Before, a loss could make you gasp. Before, it reached your heart. You were expected to have a coherent articulation for it, a way to say you knew something had happened.
And for all that the lead’s project doesn’t put the story in a rush, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty that happens. There are questions—where did the pandemic come from, why does it only affect Black people, what is responsible for the strangely persistent growths the lead keeps finding around her house—that aren’t answered in the first book, though perhaps they may be in the sequel. But there’s plenty that is addressed, perhaps most prominently people’s behaviors toward the sick. With the illness so deadly and so contagious, and with the possibilities for treatment so bleak, many distance themselves as far as they can from sick friends and family, leaving many who are ill merely waiting to die alone, with no real avenue even for palliative care. The lead’s project involves telling these people’s stories as best she can, but it also involves doing her best to provide a measure of dignity to the dying, something so often forgotten in a city gripped so thoroughly by their fears.
These explorations of dignity, grief, and the telling of people’s stories may be quiet, but they’re often beautiful, and they provide plenty of reason to pay attention to Grievers. I personally prefer books with a little more structure and more of a defining arc—Grievers is meditative in similar ways to another recent read of mine, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, but the latter features an exploration storyline that pushes the narrative forward in a way that Grievers doesn’t—and that keeps me from being absolutely blown away here, but still a plenty thoughtful and worthwhile read.
Recommended if you like: meditative reads with beautiful prose, themes of grief and memory.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for POC Author, and it also has a Prologue or Epilogue, is Indie Published, features Dreams, and is largely about Survival.
Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.