Grace After Henry by Eithne Shortall

          3.5 Stars

This book is very misleading, whilst the scene setting of the accident that tears Henry from Grace is necessary it did give me an unfavourable impression of the actual tale.  This is not so much a book about Grace and Henry but rather one about learning to live with loss and the ways in which it alters everyone it touches.  This is particularly shown through the medium of the Three Wise Men and Grace's irascible next door neighbour.

Reading it from that perspective certainly gave me more enjoyment than going down the rather clunky and disturboing relationship that Grace strikes up with Andy.  The whole situation there is very bizarre, not wholly unbelievable but certainly stretches veracity to it's limits.  It also led me to cringe away from the story in parts and skim it rather than read it as it was so uncomfortable.

The other relationships within the story are fairly standard and quite well written.  Although I am not sure that the attitude of Grace's boss (Dermot?) would be seen as that of a lovable eccentric for long and soon his hated customers would fall away; even so he is perhaps one of the more realistic and relatable characters in the book.  Only Grace really has any time devoted to building the character and that is likely only because we see everything through her eyes and her voice.

That said I did enjoy the book, on the whole, and felt that it handled the vagaries of grief so well.  From the all consuming early days where it is impossible to function through to the way you punish yourself for having the temerity to enjoy a TV show or a sunny day because X is no more.  I was not really too surprised to find that it was set in Eire as most of the novels that I have read that handle human emotion in a truly believable way are by authors from that area and set in the same landscape.  There really must be something in the water there.

It is not a classic of it's type but a solid enough read and did cause me to fall for the "one more chapter" a couple of times.