Year 6, Book 94

94. The Grief of Others by Leah Hagen Cohen
I started off really liking this book, but then found myself fairly ambivalent about it at the end. The story revolves around a family in New York. The previous year the mother was pregnant, but the baby was born with some disease that resulted in him living of only a few days. In the wake of the baby’s death the parent’s marriage has become strained. There are two older children a teenage boy, who has become ostracized at school, and his younger sister who is feeling the weight of all that has happened to her family over the past year and has been skipping school and attempting to find ways to bring her family back together. Into the midst of all this a long lost daughter from the father’s previous relationship appears pregnant with her own child and a young man, who is a stranger to the family gets drawn in to their drama while getting over the death of his own father. I liked the writing, and there were some really amazing moments in the book, but in the end I never felt like the book actually went anywhere. I give it a 6 out of 10.