Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is a strange little book. It follows a dad and his two sons as they mourn the sudden and unexpected death of his wife. In the book, grief takes the form of a big crow named Crow. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure if he was a giant crow or a regular sized crow. For some reason in my mind I thought of him as a human sized crow, but yeah maybe that isn’t accurate. 

The writing in this book is poetic, which is fitting because the father is a Ted Hughes scholar. Many of the chapters share touching and insightful moments of a family dealing with the pain of losing a loved one. However, the chapters from Crow’s perspective were often erratic and nonsensical. I’m not sure if I just didn’t get it or if there was nothing to get.

This book is a quick read and I think many people would enjoy it. I did enjoy it, despite the Crow chapters being weird. It wasn’t the idea of a talking babysitter grief Crow that was too weird… it was the writing in the Crow chapters that I didn’t really enjoy.

I’ll end this review with one of my favorite quotes from the book (not from a crow chapter) to give you a little taste of the beautiful parts. “I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.”