Words and Their Meanings by Kate Bassett

Her grief, like everyone’s grief, is not rational. She thinks of the coffin as her secret keeper, where all the thoughts she doesn’t want to think can go and die. It means holding your breath, it means stillness, it means the calmness that comes from within the closed coffin. The art of making yourself so still that death is close, breathing on your cheek. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return” (Wikipedia).Īnna is a girl consumed so much with grief that she practices coffin yoga. It’s a Portuguese word for “melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. I wrote it on my very first pair of pink converses from 9th grade. The best way I can describe the characters of this book is by using the word: saudade. Wikipedia hasn’t even tried to tackle the “sad” arena. It has several smells, several letters, and there is no google search that will tell you how many words for “sad” that any language has. Grief isn’t a box, it has too many sides, and can’t be constructed together with engineering, or math. Okay, I know right now that everyone is obsessed with the okay? okay. I will become fervent, the word of this review. So, before we get into anything, here is the link to preorder this book. It actually aches to know that because this book was published by Flux Publishing (quickly becoming one of my new favorite publishers) it may not get a chance at large retail stores. However, it’s one of those books that will sit in every section of the bookstore.

I was moved more than any book I’ve read this year and I think this book is categorized YA. You don’t want to believe the heat of your own nerves. It’s hard sometimes to be pushed by a book. This book was too tender to feel all at once.Īnd yet, it wasn’t bleak, it was fervent. This book was too overwhelming to read in a day.

Words and Their Meanings by Kate Bassett