Listening Still by Anne Griffin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved and adored Anne Griffin’s previous novel: When All Is Said. It was absolutely magnificent. So I couldn’t wait to read this one. This is the story of Jeanie Masterson who, with her family, runs an undertaking business. But they are no ordinary undertakers. Jeanie and her dad can hear the dead. They can speak to the dead briefly after they pass. And they’ve been doing so forever.
Jeanie’s life looks lovely on the surface: she is married to a kind man and they both work for the family business and live with her parents and brother. But as the story unravels, the reader gets to see the choices she made along the way and the ways in which everyone in the story feels trapped in their own life in small and big ways.
This is a story about how we give up pieces of our lives and dreams when we feel like we have obligations to the world or to our family. Or when we’re too scared to take big, bold steps in our lives. And how living with regret can be so much harder, so much more damaging and harmful.
It’s about owning up to the choices we made and taking ownership of the life we choose to design for ourselves. It’s a quiet story that can feel whiny or slow at parts but I think that’s also reflective of how hard and arduous the path back to oneself can be at times.
with gratitude to netgalley and Macmillan Audio for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Leave a Reply