Review: Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin

In Grief Cottage, Gail Godwin tells the tale of a young boy, Marcus, sent to live with his Aunt Charlotte on a small island in South Carolina. The story that unfolds is haunting, but not scary or spooky. It's a coming of age story of the best variety -- the kind where a child faces questions that even adults would be hard-pressed to answer definitively.

Marcus is a beautifully drawn character. Godwin does not take her protagonist's young age as an excuse to oversimplify him. He is considerate and complex, imaginative and curious. Also the true to his age, he repeats things he's heard word for word quite often in the narrative. This makes the words feel purposeful, as words and phrases begin to come back and mean new things in their new contexts. However, it also makes things feel a bit repetitive and on more than one occasion I found myself thinking, "Haven't I read this passage before?"

The South Carolina setting is pulled off without a hitch. Being a South Carolinian myself and having spent many summers at Isle of Palms (Godwin says her fictional island is based on Isle of Palms and Pawley's Island) so many perfect little details stood out to me: the yellow trash barrels placed at intervals along the shore, a boy in an orange shirt with a white paw print on the front, even they way Godwin describes the sky.

Most of the events in the story ring as true as the setting, but a couple fell flat for me. I thought an incident with hatching sea turtles was the most emotionally impactful scene in the novel, while the intended emotional climax felt forced due to the use of a baddie/gremlin who whispers to Marcus and leads him along. That device felt out of place given the otherwise measured, precise tone. Luckily the aftermath of the climax is fits far better with the rest of the book and ultimately left me feeling satisfied.

Grief Cottage is a remarkable novel and one I will surely recommend to other readers. Thanks, Bloomsbury, for the galley!