"The Cure for Grief" explores the theme of loss and the way individuals deal with personal tragedies. The novel is told from the perspective of Ruby, the youngest of four children and the only girl in the Bronstein family. As a series of deaths and illnesses befall the family, Ruby deals with her grief by pushing it back and attempting to lead a normal life. She puts on a facade of 'everything is OK' and rarely confides in anyone, all the while the grief is eating her up on the inside. The culmination of the novel occurs when the pent up feelings become too much for Ruby, she explodes and then finds control over her emotions, and learns to live with and move on from the loss she has experienced as a child.

Hermann writes beautifully, her descriptions are creative and well thought-out. While reading the book I thought that such intensity of feelings would be hard to describe unless one experienced them; it was interesting to read in Hermann's blog that the novel was inspired by her own "terrors of adolescence".

While I enjoyed the book and do think that Hermann is a talented writer, I failed to connect with the characters as I normally do when I read fictional work. I could not imagine Ruby as a person - what she would look like, act like, etc. So much effort was dedicated to describing her inner thoughts that there was no sense of Ruby outside of her head, and the novel dragged on towards a predictable end.

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I hated everything about the first 2/3 of this book, and then I realized how helpful a book like this would be to somebody dealing with the loss of a loved one. And then I realized that everybody in the world has to deal with that at some point, so I'm making a new bookshelf/tag "grief and loss" and will probably come back and re-read this when I need it, and most likely will award it a few more stars then.

So this story is a first novel, about young Ruby Bronstein and her family: American mom, Holocaust surviving dad, and three older brothers. The story is rife with cliffhangers, and there are some minor inconsistencies, but mostly it's incredibly awful all the bad things that happen to this poor family. With each subsequent tragedy, Ruby internalizes further, and heavily shellacs another hard-shelled candy coating onto her interior exterior.

The thing I hated most about the first 2/3 of this book was the humorlessness of it, all the jokes fell flat to me but then in the last third, when I was aware of the consequences resulting from Ruby's not dealing with her grief and as I was anticipating the healing that she was finally about to undergo, then the writing seemed to get so way much better.

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