The most recommended books for mourning

Willow is such an important novel for any teen who has gone through a traumatic event.

Willow, a 17-year-old girl is dealing with grief over the death of her parents and the fact that she was driving the car that killed them. She’s had to leave behind her old home, friends, and school. But Willow has found a way to survive, to numb the new reality of her life, she is secretly cutting herself.

For every teen that has either cut themselves, drank to numb the pain, starved themselves, or done any sort of self-harm in order to protect themselves from their inward pain, this book is for you. Not only is this story about grief and guilt, but it is also about love and never giving up.

I would read anything written by the talented Cynthia Rylant. Her books for young people introduce moving stories and unforgettable characters.
Missing May is one of those stories featuring young Summer who loses her mom and then is passed around to different aunts and uncles who don’t want to care for her. Finally, elderly Aunt May and Uncle Ob meet her and take her to live with them in West Virginia.

I especially love Rylant’s portrayal of the humble life of May, Ob, and Summer in a rusty old trailer that feels like a palace because it’s so full of love and tenderness. When May dies, Summer’s pain is compounded—and then we meet quirky Cletus who helps Summer and Ob seek relief from their grief.

Jane, Unlimited is a marvelously constructed book that focuses on Jane, a girl grieving her aunt and making umbrellas, who gets an invitation to a mysterious island mansion. I am here for all mysterious island mansion books. This estate is named Tu Reviens–"You come back” in French. That is, of course, a clue to the premise. There are a couple of possible love interests, but it’s not a love triangle and I don’t think it would annoy the people who are dead set against triangles.

I adored every single character in this book. Dan Gemeinhart is a master at pulling readers in by creating characters you want to spend time with and miss when you turn to its final page.

The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise is a joyful journey of grief. Coyote and her dad have been traveling the American countryside in a refurbished school bus far from the tragedy of a car accident that killed Coyote's mother and two sisters. Expect to learn about resilience, bravery, and the necessity of facing hard emotions we’d rather outrun.

Lisa’s husband dies as he is being treated for cancer. She writes about the first year after in which grief, madness, confusion, isolation, and fury coincide with Britain’s beginning Brexit madness. Nothing can be made sense of and yet we need words to express what’s happening. And then words provide for consoling and managing.

In All That’s Left To Say, dual timelines braid threads of a mystery together in a way that allowed me to contrast Hannah then and now and wonder not just about the mystery Hannah’s trying to solve, but about how she became the master sleuth she thinks she needs to be to get answers.

This contrast, as much as the mystery, drew me into the story and had me turning pages every time we jumped between past and present. Of course, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance also helped. How Lord imbued a single tie-straightening scene with more sexual tension than most kissing scenes might be the biggest mystery in this book.

I discovered this book last year thanks to BookTok and immediately fell in love with it. But I’m not the only one! Just this past month, it found its way onto The New York Times bestseller list two years after its initial publication.

The setting of this one is a little more contained than the previous two books on this list: most of the story takes place on Martha’s Vineyard. K.L. Walther lovingly captures the nostalgia of a warm, seaside, ice-cream-melting New England summer. This one’s also sort of a coming-of-age novel, sitting right on the cusp between young adult and adult.

Lisey Landon, the widow of a well-known author, struggles to know who her husband really was.

In real time, which is one of two storylines, Lisey’s sister, Amanda comes to visit and they search magazines and books to find where Lisey is written up. Amanda is troubled, becomes catatonic and Lisey has to care for her. The other storyline is about Scott Landon, his rough past and how he hovers over Lisey’s life, although he is deceased.

What is striking about this novel is the writing and Lisey’s journey. The reader is drawn in at once. When Lisey is able to enter another world called Boo’ya, as her husband did, she is able to save her sister. And by the end of the novel, Lisey herself is set free of her demons. This novel has stayed with me for years.

Aimee Baker’s Doe is a diptych: poems in the first section focus on missing women, while those in the second section reimagine the lives of unidentified women.

Baker creates recurrent, multiple patterns of imagery that celebrate the beauty and dignity of each woman – in argument, essentially, with the ways true crime sometimes exploits and objectifies victims’ lives. At the same time, Doe is about North America as a captivating space of the imagination: the poet creates a geography by turns intimate and vast, familiar and strange, beautiful and terrible.

The finely-crafted textures of the poems in Doe, as well as the apparent dedication to investigation and research in the work overall, make for a rare combination.

My Goodreads review of this book just says, “Yes yes yes yes yes this is the good stuff,” if you want a sign of my emotional reaction to Our Wives Under the Sea.

This is a gorgeous, compact, spooky, haunting novel about a marriage falling apart, and it came into my life at exactly the right time. Miri’s wife, Leah, is an undersea explorer who vanishes for months under the water without a trace. Finally, she returns—but has all of Leah come back?

I would call this half dark fantasy horror, half contemporary queer literary fiction. Or Mitski meets The Haunting of Hill House. It checked all my boxes, and I whipped through it in two sittings. In other words, “the good stuff.”