The Grief Nurse was a total cover buy for me and I rarely do cover buys - but Oxfam had a 4 for 3 deal on and nothing else had caught my eye 👀 I’m glad it was essentially free because it wasn’t really my cup of tea. (Again, I’m pondering my unwillingness to DNF in 2024.)

It’s a quiet fantasy novel which hinges around the idea of grief nurses, children born with the ability to siphon off (rich) people’s grief, despair, sorrow, so they can live happily and be ‘Bright’, unencumbered by annoyances like grieving your dead child etc. It’s told from the POV of Lynx, a young woman working as a grief nurse for an aristocratic family whose fortune is running out. It was unexpectedly queer which is always a nice surprise, but that didn’t make up for the lack of urgency. Like there was definitely a plot but I struggled to care about it. The idea of siphoning off a person’s grief is interesting, but nothing about this world is explained - why did people start wanting rid of their grief? How did grief nurses come to be? How do their powers work?

An interesting premise, engaging writing, but missing something crucial for me.