| Title | : | Grievers (Grievers, #1) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1849354529 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781849354523 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 204 |
| Publication | : | First published September 7, 2021 |
Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.
Grievers (Grievers, #1) Reviews
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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 picture of grief that I have come to know more intimately than I ever cared to. A beautifully, thoughtfully written story that is painful in its realism and feels devastatingly possible.
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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 others flee. She stays and finds a purpose to continue on and in the end finds a little glimpse of hope.
I don't want to say too much so I'll only say give Grievers a read if you're feeling up to it. I don't think you'll have any regrets. -
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 moving, and caring for her.
Soon after, multiple people, also black, begin showing up in Detroit's emergency rooms with their similarly afflicted family members. There is no real treatment, and no hope for a miracle cure, as doctors are mystified by the cause, and transmission, and with the knowledge that once contracted, people tend to die within a few weeks.
Meanwhile, anyone with any money, or places that can escape to, flee Detroit, leaving the black population increasingly without healthcare, food, and other basic infrastructure, in a city already whacked hard by a failing economy, lost jobs, an incompetent city government, dying neighbourhoods and failing infrastructure.
Dune though wracked by grief, travels the city for food, and uses her father's detailed, modelled map of the city, and begins tracking the deaths, more for something to do while she forages.
This was a deeply sorrowful story. Dune watches her city doe around her, even while she mourns the deaths close to her, and uses the work her parents did, and their knowledge of their city and the activist connections they had to find a way to carry on living. It’s a story of unimaginable grief, and hopelessness, and melancholy. And at the same time, I found Dune magnetic, a person who, despite her overwhelming grief, teaches herself to forage in community gardens, to cook, to preserve her foraged finds, to honour the sick and dead she finds all around her, by noting their locations, and any, possible whispered words they might still utter. It’s a small thing, but I found it so powerful.
The story ends with no hope yet in sight for a cure, but I found at the same time the ending hopeful, with Dune celebrating her birthday, and by opening her broken heart a little by accepting a possible companion.
This is a wonderful, but seriously sad work, and I’m so glad I read it.
Thank you to Edelweiss and to the Publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. -
“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 purchased a few different books (I admit it’s hard to limit myself and get only one) and amongst them was Grievers.
Sometimes I go into a bookstore and know which book on my TBR list I want to find and other times I just find a book that I fall in love with and just have to get. Grievers was the latter. The title and the dark cover attracted my attention and once I opened the book and read the mission of the Black Dawn series, I knew that I had to have it.
Dune is the protagonist of this book and her mother is patient zero for H-8, a syndrome that has plagued Detroit’s Black community and causes people to freeze mid-sentence or mid-action. Those affected by H-8 slowly drift away, losing their will to eat and drink, their faces a mask of plain grief.
Grievers is a futuristic depiction of a city that slowly turns into a ghost town. It’s not an action packed book and doesn’t provide all the answers on this syndrome, but this book instead focuses on the early stages of the breakout of a virus and depicts extreme loss. There are so many other themes in this book that make it worth reading like activism and being a leader of a community to support a specific cause, caring for the dead and the elderly, having a sense of place and duty.
My favorite quote was in a scene where Dune walked down to the basement where her father kept a mock up of Detroit: “She stopped on the stair, paused by the parallel presence and absence of her father.” How true it is that after the loss of someone it hurts so much to simultaneously feel their presence and absence in a place. -
I hope adrienne maree brown is feeling okay wherever she is
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I rarely read fiction but if adrienne maree brown is writing it? Yes, please! The story was all the more poignant for having lived and worked near Detroit almost a decade ago. Looking forward to the rest of the trilogy. Haunting but beautifully written.
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This book gripped me! The pose and writing of this story blew me away. A beautiful story of love, survival, and trusting yourself.
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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 around her, she still pushed forward and never gave up. The story itself was so interesting and I couldn't put it down. It's a sad one and the content is heavy but I enjoyed it so much and am looking forward to the next book in the Black Dawn Series.
Thanks so much to Zgstories and AK Press for my gifted copy! -
This book was A LOT. It is quite short, but there is a lot packed into it and it was all pretty heavy.
It's set in a dystopian near-future Detroit, where a mysterious syndrome is killing Black folks. It was difficult to read, as we are still in the midst of a pandemic, and while this wasn't overly similar to Covid, it was still hard to read.
While this book is a lot about death and grieving, it's also about caring. There is just so much about caring and what it means, to care for your family, for your community, for strangers, for a dog. It was something that really jumped out to me, that despite the world going to shit, that Dune was still such a caring person.
I felt like the book kind of came to an abrupt end, but it also felt like a good ending. -
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 opportunity to reflect on the last 3 years of our own real-life pandemic-in-a-pandemic-in-a-pandemic. Finally, I have my own questions about grief, having lost my own mother and father in different ways by a relatively young age to trauma and addiction. The back of the book mentions, "the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared." What's the debt of grief, it makes you wonder? Who's the debtor and who's the collector? How do you clear it? Is that possible? What magic?
You should read this book if you are Black and masculine and are in need of a main character. Also, if you are a happy loner, love Grace Lee Boggs, were raised by movement parents, have taken care of an aging house, or have taken care of aging family once they stop talking and start wearing diapers. There are so many reasons to read this book! If you are interested in alternative funerary practices, if you love Detroit, if you have a Black and an Asian parent, if you've ever lived with ashes, stray dogs or Senegalese masks.
You shouldn't read this book if you don't want to feel like a tea bag steeping in very hot and increasingly murky recollections of things like loneliness, indifferent doctors and hopeless volunteers, if you don't want to be reminded of the opioid epidemic, or the AIDS epidemic, the smell of urine or burning flesh, or the rhythms of an alcoholic.
Highlights for me include the fact that the story is more supernatural and spiritual than science fiction or fantasy, my delight in hearing the narrator's spoken voice for what seemed like the first time, the pleasure of getting to know Dune through the familiar conversational contours of lesbian exes fighting. I really enjoyed the wave of relief and excitement I felt as Dune, the main character, walks into a room full of people for the first time in a long time and talks with her auntie Elouise, who delights in Dune and affirms her and rattles off options for collaboration and connection the way organizers do. And there is a part toward the end where adrienne maree brown lets us into the thoughts of Dune's grandmother, long mute, for a whole chapter as she dies, a choice which was so refreshing, and satisfying and smart and made for one of the most beautiful moments in the book. We spend the last pages of the book with Dune as she is orphaned once and for all and I appreciated this the most, a depiction of a character in the first days of that strange and -- depending on the circumstances -- wonderful transition.
As far as the debt of grief goes, I'm still not sure what brown would like us, or me, or anyone, to think. Dune's father was killed accidentally by someone who is sorry and pays the price both through the criminal "justice" system, but also by giving Dune money, quietly in private, though Dune never spends it. To go deeper than that, I would need to talk to other people, to really figure out the possibilities. But like Dune, these days, already being a kind of orphan, and feeling kind of orphaned by the pandemic, though I know I am going to have to find people eventually, right now I am enjoying being alone, reading and eating cake with dogs. -
I feel like this book was made for me in this time. I related strongly to Dune in many ways but mostly in the way she handled grief. I felt comforted my Dune's rage and curiosity in the face of death and disease and felt connected to her strong sense of justice. i also adored the way her queerness was expressed throughout the book, not as a main feature of the book but something that added to her character💜
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2.5*
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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 garble of words into English - except it was in English.
I think if I were a Detroit native, maybe I'd understand the world this story is set in a little more, and maybe I'd feel more connected to the character and her story, but that wasn't the case. I wish the author had put more effort into making this character-driven - focusing on how Dune was feeling, the thoughts that passed her mind… but the story read like a never-ending hum of "Dune did this. Dune did that. Dune saw this." It was so… empty and emotionally absent, and I found myself skimming to at least find some thread of interesting action to pull me forward.
In the end, I set the book aside. It just wasn't my cup of tea, and I was bored of forcing myself to try and follow what was going on. -
Another
reviewer described this series as ‘An apocalyptic fairytale of anarchic community care and interdependence’, and that’s far better than I could sum it up, but I’ll try anyway:
This book caught me off guard. I had read the synopsis, but only back when I bought it a few months ago, on a spontaneous stop in
The Bookish Type in Leeds. I was lugging around a heavy bag from a trip I’d taken myself on to Hebden Bridge to try and absorb nature and figure out my own attempt at writing. I was anxiously trying not to knock anything off the shelves (or anyone else in there over) while being overwhelmed by choice. (It’s a really great shop, with a diverse range of books, I recommend it if you’re nearby!) So by this point I couldn’t quite remember what I’d ended up buying and I went in knowing very little. I’m glad I did.
It’s a pandemic book. It feels heavily influenced by Covid and the surge of uprisings and general public attention on social justice and the Black Lives Matter movements throughout that time. You can feel the power behind these words, you can feel the grief and longing and anger and, considering that Octavia E. Butler is mentioned a few times in relation to the author and their work I feel it’s relevant to say, there is maybe an Octavia E. Butler feel about it.
(I say, having only read Kindred and The Parable of the Sower (which were both amazing) - but I feel some of the same intention or style maybe in there?)
This is a short book, the first novella in a series of 3, and it’s a powerful, moving story. It's an exploration of grief, power, loss, determination, obligation, purpose and love. We centre on the character of Dune, whose mother is considered to be patient-zero of a mysterious illness that just stops people. It stops them wherever they are, whatever they are doing or saying, they just stand still and they don’t move again. Dune has already lived through the death of her father, her grandmother mute and coming across somewhat lost ever since that death, the recent break-up with her girlfriend, who she’d been with since they were teens, and now this, a pandemic, where the city she loves, that her father loved and researched and kept note of each change, from gentrification to demolition, is falling apart.
Dune finds and loses her purpose through a multitude of things, from canning food to cataloging the dead, staving off intimacy to yearning for it; grasping to the questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ once she’s done all she can to answer the rest.
It was hard to read at times, it does hit very close to home, and if you’re not ready to read about a pandemic so close to our own I’d say put it on a list for later. But if you do feel slightly ready, it’s a beautiful, saddening, anger inducing exploration of a similar thing to what we went through. adrienne maree brown uses this fictional pandemic to bring to the surface things that were attempted to be hidden in ours. People and communities that are threatened daily through systemic violence and neglect. If these victims of the syndrome look like they were stopped in a moment of overwhelming grief then it’s because they were, and a lot of that grief may not just be close and personal, but institutional and targeted.
The writing is beautiful and emotive and I think if I was too close to grief right now I wouldn’t have been able to get through it. But maybe it could be comforting, as there’s definitely moments of feeling seen in what you may feel you alone do in grief. To me It feels like a book someone may study sometime in the future, when people are trying to make sense of this point in history; students extrapolating points to understand the social/political climate of our time. It reflects this time and shines a different kind of light on it, or maybe puts it through a sieve and shakes away some parts to reveal others more?
I want to dive straight into the second book, but it’s so recently out that I think I’ll wait a little bit so that there’s not too long of a wait for book 3 and I can still feel everything from the ones before. I really do recommend this book, but with the caveat that it may be difficult. (Happy to answer questions if people are unsure.) But I can’t wait to read more from brown because this was written so beautifully and I’m sure her non-fiction is also. I also feel that their non-fiction is probably brimming with just as much passion and power as this is. There are sentences that are going to stick with me for a long time, either just from the feeling they give me or for the time I need to ruminate on them to figure them out.
There’s not twists and turns and a huge driving plot to this, it’s an exploration of grief, community and trauma. The more I think about this book the more I feel the emotion of it all. It was so short yet look at how much it holds and how much it gives. -
I struggled to finish this one, which surprised me given how much I love adrienne maree brown's writing in general. Her nonfiction is absolutely outstanding, so engaging and intimate, incredibly readable and wise. And I've enjoyed several of her short stories. This book, however, didn't engage me the same way. It had a lot of telling rather than showing, with brown listing facts, details, and backstory, rather than helping us experience the characters and the story through our senses. She relies a lot on the geography of Detroit — she will list a landmark or cross-street as a primary descriptor, but for those of us who have never been to Detroit, these references don't really contribute to a vision of the setting. This is in contrast to her Detroit-centered short story, The River, which crafted a clear picture of the city and allowed me to connect fully with the setting. I wonder if this might have been more successful as a short story, with brown editing down the exposition and distilling the important details?
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There's pandemic in Detroit, only Detroit, and it only affects Black people. Dune's mother is patient zero. The sufferers are not sick, they suddenly go comatose with expressions of deep grief on their faces. The authorities call the syndrome H-8 (yes you can read that as "hate"), and do not know the cause and there is no cure. Those who get it usually die within a few days. Dune starts making a study of the sick people she finds around the streets, trying to figure out what is going on while processing the grief she feels over her mother's death, the death of friends, and the slow death of Detroit.
This is the first in a series of what I believe with be a trilogy, which means there is no resolution at the end. I look forward to reading the next one in hopes I'll find out why Dune hasn't gotten sick and what's up with the scale model of Detroit in the basement that her father built that has a mysterious mold and leaves growing out of it. -
Please let this be the start of a series from amb!!!!
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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 function." This plague arrives suddenly and it freezes people, their faces mildly spasming in an unfathomable expression of grief. They are entirely dissociated from their bodies and deteriorate over time until they die. Life-support systems only prolong the inevitable. There is no recovery. The illness only seems to be affecting Black people living in Detroit. The protagonist Dune, a queer woman with a Black mother and a Chinese father, is from a family deeply involved in social justice work beset with loss.
The novel is engaging with really solid prose and it's hard to believe it is brown's fictional debut. It's a homage to Detroit, the city larger than life on the page. There is a deep vein of social justice activism running throughout. I like how sci-fi/speculative fiction elements provide a nice frame to explore topics very close to home. I must say that the synopsis is a little misleading, raising expectations that brown does not substantiate inside. It also ends on a soft cliffhanger and is very much setup as the first book in an expected trilogy. So I assume all the loose threads will be addressed in the future.
(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.) -
This is a haunting book. You can feel the loneliness and despair in each word and chapter. Dune's mom is patient zero, the first to go down in a new syndrome - a new pandemic. Dune must learn to navigate the world without her mom but also without the help of most of her friends and family. She is left to sort her mother's life in the house and what her legacy is but she also needs to find who she is now that her mom is gone. It's a story about deep sadness and resilience and the will to survive when the fight to do so feels overwhelming and too much. Dune's thoughts, ideas and her need to learn everyone's story around her was deeply moving. This is a story that will make you think and definitely stick with you.
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. -
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 take? adrienne maree brown gives us a poetically delivered story and a deep hope.
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A quiet and breathtakingly heart-breaking novella about a pandemic that affects only Black folks in a predominantly Black-built city that has been ravaged by racism and racist environmental harm. So grateful that a friend gave me this a few weeks ago. It was exactly the book I needed right now. I love adrienne maree brown's non-fiction. it has literally changed my life 1000 times over. And this novella holds all the same themes, including the saying from Emergent Strategy, "Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)" which we see so starkly in the fact that this pandemic, this illness killing Black folks is happening ONLY in Detroit. Detroit as the small, reflecting back the all of white supremacy and grief. "How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.", says amb in one of my favorite posts.
I can't wait for the rest of this trilogy - just pre-ordered Maroons, which is Grievers #2 that is published in early 2023, and until then am tiding myself over listening to podcasts and other ways to sit with the author and her brilliant ways of helping us understand the world and our places in it.
"A strange sickness is sweeping through Detroit, leaving unbearable grief and overwhelmed city hospitals and morgues in its wake. That’s the eerily familiar world into which writer adrienne maree brown’s debut novella drops us.
'That initial spark of the idea was like, every time I lose someone, I'm struck by how quickly I'm expected to be functional again,' said brown. 'And it piles up in me—this need to take time and go grieve, but not having that time.'
The seed of the story took root a long time before any of us had ever heard of COVID-19, and yet the book is a work of speculative fiction that feels anything but. It’s an auspicious and affecting story, for everyone who’s lost something, but especially for Black Detroiters."
https://www.michiganradio.org/podcast... -
I'm kind of disappointed by this, but it wasn't bad, it was kind of good? I think I'd enjoy it more if I hadn't read adrienne's nonfiction because this reads almost exactly the same as her nonfiction. Because of that it feels very-- I don't want to say preachy because that's somewhat the point but I think the desire to get the points on activism and community across she sacrifices characterization and prose? So it feels kind of Very Special Episode Of Black Mirror rather than storytelling. The characters are by far the weakest part, though there was some attempts at complexity with Marta and Vivian that I appreciated. I wasn't planning on reading the second but I'm very intrigued by the overarching plot of the virus and this book left the ending opening,though I imagine the sequel probably also leaves it open since the virus is largely a part of the allegory. I don't know. I'm happy I read it though, reading about grief is so important to me.
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Incredibly detailed and intimate. It takes a look at the nature of grief both collective and deeply personal. For all of that I couldn’t wait to finish this book and not in a positive way. I have zero interest learning what happens to Dune or Detroit next. I went in very excited and it just kind of dragged with no real information about the plague, the world, or anything other than a deeply personal look at one person.
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I will only say that this is a beautiful book, where nothing happens. I'm not sure how it was made into a full length novel, let alone a trilogy, but I hope at the end there's some closure to the plot instead of "everyone was sad and died, the end". With different marketing this could be a successful contemporary novel about social justice, gentrification, racial divides, and feminism but there is no horror beyond what we all saw in the 2020 news cycle.
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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). -
3.5 stars. I love a quiet SF/dystopian story, so that appealed to me here. It’s a very sad story with lots of death and despair, though. I am curious as to where it’s going since I know it’s the start of a trilogy. Pretty bleak at the moment.
Things that didn’t work so well for me were the on-the-nose aspects of the story. “H-8” syndrome which impacts only Black people. There’s also a lot of love for Detroit clear here, and anytime a story is a “love letter to x city” it doesn’t work as well for me. I don’t have any of those feelings toward any place I’ve lived.
Normally a quiet story does a lot of character work or something instead, and there just wasn’t a lot of that here. It was kind of repetitive. But there were some really moving moments (like when Dune finds Eloise or when Dune takes care of Mama Vivian). -
I loved this. Review soon.
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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.
