I give Grief Cottage 3 stars. As always, Gail Godwin writes beautifully, and in such a manner that you feel you are there with the characters.

Marcus, an eleven year old boy, is the main character. He was raised as the only child of a single mother. Life wasn't easy, but they scraped by. When his mother dies in a car accident, Marcus is sent to live with his only living relative, a great-aunt named Charlotte, a reclusive artist on a small island in South Carolina. Marcus fills his days roaming the island and takes special interest in Grief Cottage, which is the subject of many of Charlotte's paintings. The cottage is in great disrepair, and has been for 50 years, since a couple and their son who were renting the cottage for vacation disappeared during a hurricane. None of them were ever found. During one of his visits to the cottage, Marcus believes he sees the ghost of the boy who disappeared and starts visiting the cottage every day. As everyone else he is in contact with on the island is elderly, the ghost soon becomes the "friend" he doesn't have.

The book is slow-paced, and I found the main character, Marcus, an eleven year old boy, very likeable, but not very realistic. He is WAY too mature for his years, which distracted me. Not my favorite work by Ms. Godwin.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA publishers for allowing me to read an e-ARC of this book.

Gail Godwin is one of my favorite authors. I think Father Melancholy's Daughter was her first book that I read, and I was hooked from there. I'd probably enjoy reading a grocery list she wrote -- she's just that good. She develops characters really well, creates a mood wonderfully, and is a great storyteller. A quick look at her site shows me she will turn 80 in June. And, she has a new book out. You have to be impressed by a work ethic like that!

Her latest, Grief Cottage, features more of the great characters I've come to expect from Godwin. The main character is Marcus, an amazingly-precocious 11-year-old.

"Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it."

Marcus has never known who his dad is. It's just him and his mom, who has told him she'll reveal dad's identity at some time when Marcus is old enough to make sense of things. But, Mom is killed in a car accident and Marcus ends up briefly in a foster family before finally landing with his quirky artist great-aunt Charlotte.

"For a large part of my life I have lived alone ... and it has suited me very well," Charlotte tells Marcus. He takes this to heart and immediately feels obligated to earn his keep, lest he be sent away. And indeed, as Marcus cooks, cleans, and helps out elderly neighbors along the beach where he and Aunt Charlotte live, I found myself wishing more than once that I had my own Marcus around. What a great kid!

The book's title comes from a dilapidated cottage along the beach, where a mom, dad, and their young son had been killed during a hurricane decades ago. Marcus becomes intrigued by this family, particularly the boy, and visits "grief cottage" almost every day on bike rides. He hopes (and sometimes succeeds) in finding the boy's ghost/presence.

Quotes or bits from the book that I liked:

*"Funny how the same person can be an entirely different entity to various people."
*"How is it that some people can make us feel worthless even when we know we're seeing ourselves through their eyes? Certain humans are poison."
*"Marcus feels the pain of others," said Aunt Charlotte, "even when they're dead and gone."
*"You can't do anything about it because you're a child and you have no way to compare your life to other people's lives. Your foremost need is to stay safe within the only life you know."
*"After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day."
*"We know so very little about the people we are closest to. We know so little about ourselves."
*"People have so many ways of shooting themselves in the foot to avoid facing something."
And finally, on a lighter note: "You could dislike someone and still admire their hairstyle." :)

So that's a taste of Gail Godwin and her writing. She makes such keen observations! Now, after all this praise, I don't think this is one of her best books. The ending was a bit confusing to me and she threw in a few PC elements that further soured me on it. However, it's probably worth reading just for a taste of the author's writing. Better yet, read something else she's written.

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31450969-grief-cottage" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Grief Cottage" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1495821355m/31450969.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31450969-grief-cottage">Grief Cottage</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18525.Gail_Godwin">Gail Godwin</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1891005031">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
3.5<br />I really loved Marcus, an 11 yr old very bright boy. He is being raised by his mother and they are not well off, one night she goes out to get them pizza and dies from a car wreck. He then goes to live with his great aunt Charlotte who becomes his guardian, at a beach cottage in South Carolina.<br /><br />There is a neighboring cottage that was rented by a family 50 yrs earlier during a hurricane and none of that family has ever been found. Hence the name, Grief Cottage. Marcus has seen the ghost of the son of that family during a visit to that rundown cottage and it consumes him for awhile.<br /><br />There are many really good characters in this story and some really touching moments, but the book just moved very slow for me. <br /><br />Thank you to Bloomsbury Publishing, Netgalley, and author Gail Godwin for the advanced digital book!
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12851291-karen">View all my reviews</a>

I was drawn to this book by the cover which really sets the stage for the story – to quote the book "it emanates a powerful mood" and I was captured by it immediately. This is not a fast paced book but rather a thoughtful, quiet atmospheric ghost story told through the eyes of young boy dealing with the grief of losing his mother. The writing is beautiful and I felt like I was there in this small island community watching Marcus ride up and down the shore on his bike as he wrestles with his loss, his insecurities, who he is to become and with the mystery behind the ghost of Grief Cottage. I really enjoyed it. 4*

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

BookFilter review: Gail Godwin follows up her precisely poised novel "Flora" with this literary ghost story about an orphaned eleven year old boy named Marcus. Sent off to live with an aunt he's never met, Marcus is naturally wary and eager to please. But Aunt Charlotte is a prickly, hard to read sort who says exactly what she thinks but somehow leaves Marcus wondering about the subtext of what she means. Is he in the way? Will she grow bored with him and send Marcus away? Plus, exactly how much wine can this eccentric woman drink in a single day? And then there's Grief Cottage, falling-down eyesore on the beach that Aunt Charlotte paints over and over again (selling the results to support herself) while Marcus is drawn closer to it every day until once, he swears, he sees the ghostly apparition of the little boy who disappeared from that home some 50 years ago. Sadly, some vivid characters and Godwin's elegant writing can't disguise a story that feels far too thought out to come alive. Marcus is an almost absurdly mature eleven year old boy in his inner thoughts. One can accept a precocious child (indeed, his friend Wheezer is just such a character) but Marcus's inner dialogue strains credulity. This problem worsens as the novel goes on and we spend more and more time close to his subconscious. And it all falls apart in the dramatic, atypical finale. Even this is marred further by an epilogue that spells things out far too neatly. A disappointing effort. -- Michael Giltz

Although I was interested enough to read this book in an evening, the story's attempt to fit into several genres left me unimpressed. I most enjoyed the dynamics between Marcus, Aunt Charlotte, and Lash. The story of a young boy moving to the sea with a great-aunt he'd never met following his mother's death would be a compelling story in and of itself. But this story wanted to be a thriller/mystery too so there's the Grief Cottage/ghost element. That was the least interesting part of the book to me, but it was trying to be the most interesting.

Also, I have to mention, the almost throw-away reveal at the very end just felt cheap because it wasn't developed at all, and that mystery wasn't a primary one in the story.

This book would be a good beach read for me, but others might find it too slow even for that.

The subtle lyrics of "Grief Cottage" combine the sound and sensation of the waves, sand and weathered wood. While the pace is as leisurely as a summer stroll, the passages beautifully illustrate grief, human flaws and how people imprint themselves upon us. Marcus is the only son of a plucky, struggling single mother. His paternity is a mystery. He is devastated by his mother's sudden death, yet his description of the immediate aftermath is rendered sedately. He goes to live with his artist aunt on an island rich with lore and accents as thick as the marshes of South Carolina. His fascination with a mysterious figure only he can see and hear and trying to manage his kindly but troubled aunt's demons eventually lead him to face his own grief. A hint of the supernatural, an unflinching look at aging, dying, secrets and humanity and one of the most beautifully written descriptions of grief make this a memorable work.

Marcus was 11 when his mother died in a car accident, and he went to live with his great aunt Charlotte, his only relative, in her beach side house. Both loners, the two of them are damaged by their pasts and trying their bests to live in the same space. Marcus becomes fascinated by a deserted cottage at the end of the beach, and the story of a family that disappeared in a long ago hurricane. A very precocious and most introspective pre-teen, Marcus is convinced that a ghost of the boy is living in the cottage and that they are communicating with each other. His summer becomes even more solitary when Aunt Charlotte falls, necessitating hospitalization and rehab, and as she becomes more depressed she isolates herself even more. While both Marcus and Charlotte are sympathetic characters, and the first person voice of Marcus adds immediacy to the narrative, readers may have a hard time imagining that any eleven-year-old could possibly be so self-aware and discerning. Still, we feel his pains and sadness acutely.

“We know so very little about the people we are closest to. We know so little about ourselves.”

Gail Godwin has been lauded and honored many times over, and has five New York Times Bestsellers to her credit. I read Grief Cottage free and early, thanks to Net Galley and Bloomsbury USA. Now I have to find her earlier work and read it, because her extraordinary prose is worth seeking out. Those that love achingly brilliant literary fiction will want to read this book, which will be available to the public June 6, 2017.

Marcus and his mother live alone and are very close; when she dies, it is as if the bottom has fallen out of his world. He is taken in by a relative he has never met; his Great-Aunt Charlotte lives on a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina. Haunted by his grief, Marcus is drawn to a cottage said to be haunted by a boy that died in a hurricane many years before.

The story begins with a lengthy internal monologue that made me fear I’d regret requesting the review copy. There’s a saying that only those that know the rules of written convention well are entitled to break them upon occasion, and Godwin is one that does, and she does it for a reason. I can promise the reader that if you push through the first twenty percent of the story, complete with very frequently used parenthesis, you’ll be in it for keeps.

Marcus is one of the most resonant characters I’ve read in a long time. He is orphaned, unmoored, and friendless; his one good friend insulted Marcus’s mother, and the friendship was broken. Now his great fear is that Great-Aunt Charlotte, a reclusive painter that values her privacy and has a very small home, may grow weary of the inconvenience of having him with her and send him away. The reader can clearly see this brusque but thoughtful woman grow attached to her young relative, but Marcus is too overwhelmed and depressed to catch a clue. He tries to make himself scarce to reduce his impact on her, and in doing so spends an inordinate amount of time nurturing and watching the nests of leatherback turtle eggs laid on Charlotte’s beach, and walking or biking back and forth to the far end of the island, where the legendary Grief Cottage, Charlotte’s most lucrative painting subject, sits desolate and friendless, not unlike Marcus himself.

A measure of a well written a novel is the way our affection for it lingers after we have finished reading it and look back after we've read other things. Because I received a very early galley for this one, I have read and reviewed 24 other books since this one, and yet when I see the cover for this title, I heave a deeply satisfied sigh. Oh yes. Grief Cottage. That one was wonderful!

Those that only enjoy action-packed thrillers will have no joy here; rather, Godwin’s prose is the sort one sinks into, like a deep feather bed or a favorite chair by the fire. For those that love strong literature, I cannot think of a better way to spend quiet spring evenings.

Highly recommended.

Engaging and beautifully written.

Interesting characters, intriqujng storyline. Slow moving story - writing kept me hooked - a mix of quirky characters and a ghost story. Really enjoyed this unique novel.

A real page turner couldn't put it down characters are well developed

The stream of consciousness writing was very tedious and a chore to finish this book. The overall premise of the story had potential, but just didn't quite hit the mark. The writing was too sophisticated for the narration from a child's perspective.

Loved, loved this recent novel by one of my all-time favorite authors, Gail Godwin. Pretty classic writing and I gulped it down.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, I had the privilege of reading Grief Cottage, by Gail Godwin. I loved everything about this book and grew to care about what happened to each character. Marcus, age 11, loses his mother and goes to live with his artistic Aunt Charlotte, who has lived a reclusive beach life for close to 30 years. As each gets to know and respect each other, they learn how to cope with their pasts, resolve struggles in their lives, and deal with the ghost in Grief Cottage. This beautifully written book will appeal to every age reader and leave a lasting impression. I loved this book.

I loved this novel but I was not able to finish it before it was archived. Thank you for the opportunity.

11 year old Marcus Harshaw found himself living with his Great Aunt Charlotte on an island off the coast of South Carolina after his mother's accidental death. Marcus' mother had taken out a large insurance policy and so he now had a trust fund. Aunt Charlotte, an unconventional woman who made a good living painting, had never had children of her own but was willing to care for the boy.

Charlotte relinquished her bedroom and moved to her studio, so that Marcus would have his own room. All his life Marcus had shared a bed with his late mother. He never knew his Dad but his mother had shown him a photo of the man. She promised to tell him more about the man at a later date but died before she could fulfill the promise. Charlotte's friend and former business partner, Lachicotte, took a liking to Marcus, a boy who had never had a male figure in his life. Coral, an elderly summer resident next door, shared stories with Marcus about life on the island when he visited her daily.

At one end of the island was a decrepit cottage that was known as the Grief Cottage. Back in 1954 a hurricane had hit the island and the family occupying the cottage had disappeared. Marcus was fascinated by the cottage and visited it almost daily. There was no record of the names of the family members who had been in the house when the hurricane hit. Eventually Marcus learned the name of the family's son but not before he met the missing boy's ghost at the cottage.

This coming of age story will also appeal to those who enjoy stories about life on barrier islands and the South.

I am sure there will be mixed reviews on this book. Is it a ghost story, a coming of age story, is it for YA readers or adults? I am not sure which it is, but I really enjoyed the story.

Marcus our main character is suddenly left alone when his mother dies going out for pizza. Sent to his great Aunt Charlotte, a reclusive artist living on an island in South Carolina.

The story is told over a summer but also jumps back to the past a few times. Marcus fills his days tending the turtle egg mound and exploring the ramshackle cottage to the north. When he finds out the family who was living there had a son and they had all disappeared in Hurricane Hazel and were presumed dead he is convinced that he can see the ghost of the boy and goes every day to make contact with him.

On one hand I enjoyed the story and the language the author used and on the other hand, it was a bit disorienting when Marcus was 'talking' to people who weren't there and I still don't understand the Wheezer characters frequent appearances in Marcus's head.

The last section lost me. After all of the build up the ending was just not what I expected.

3.5 A very slow paced book which took me a bit to fully engage. Two things kept me reading. The first was the beautiful writing, Godwin is exceptional at her word usage, to create both atmosphere and her characters. The second was the character of Marcus, only eleven when he lost his mother and sent to live with a reclusive artist, who is his great aunt. He is just so likable, responsible beyond his years and yet still full of curiosity and wonder. It was though, his character that presented me with another hurdle to overcome. Could an eleven year old be this mature sounding in this thoughts and reasoning.i decided that he could given that his mom worked so hard and he did his best to take care of her, and took care of many things in their home to make things easier for her.

The setting is fantastic as well, a beach cottage on the ocean with a derelict cottage at the end of the strip. This is the grief cottage, named so because three residents, one a teenage boy are lost in a hurricane, fifty years before. Ghosts, real and the ghosts we carry inside, from previous hurts, our childhoods and how we use what we can to move forward and expel them. Families, we sometimes need to make, and sometimes these can turn out wonderful. So this is loosely an actual ghost story but goes much deeper. Was quite engaged by books end and loved watching Marcus come to terms with his new life, though a surprise when he is older, a reconnection Wil provide him with an answer to a mystery from his old.

ARC from Netgalley.

I have read Gail Godwin for decades so was looking forward to her latest novel.

I went back and forth as to what I thought. The one constant was her beautiful writing.

A coming of age story. After his [single] mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt Charlotte, a reclusive painter [and likely, closer to an alcoholic, rather than a person who just likes her wine]. She tells Marcus of a ruined cottage that she formerly visited regularly and from which she makes a livelihood by painting its likeness. Called "Grief Cottage" by the islanders, Marcus becomes entranced with the ruined, empty building as a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane fifty years before and their bodies were never found.

Both Marcus and Charlotte are solitary people but they have a lovely, if odd, relationship. She's supposed to be the caretaker, but... Perhaps it's because they are both lost souls. Marcus is a very old soul so he fits in beautifully with his new friends on the island--of an older generation--notably Lachiotte [Lash] and Charlie Coggins.

Marcus also befriends the elderly invalid Coral Upchurch [have to love that name!]. Coral is responsible for this: "... I have to put in requests to my brain, as one does at the library, and then a little worker takes my slip and disappears into the stacks." [Loved that] He is also an incredibly helpful, giving person -- to Charlotte, Coral, Lash, Charlie.

Wheezer, a contemporary of Marcus' before his mother's death, had a big impact on Marcus [related early on in the book]. I wondered if he would figure in later--and lo, he did.

Billed as a sort of ghost story--well, sometimes, but more coming of age, grief, remorse, memories and trying to fit in. The lost boy in the cottage is not the only ghost, however. And there is the gremlin. And other parallels--causes of death--revealing no more as a small spoiler alert.

I vacillated on what to rate this book because my feelings kept changing. It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the book. And my interest in the story waxed and waned. But, the ending elevated it to a four for me. [Really a strong 3.5]