THE CURE FOR GRIEF
by Nellie Hermann

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):

A subtle, elegiac coming-of-age novel about catastrophe, grief and the persistence of everyday life.

In her stunning debut, Hermann explores the long-term ramifications of unassimilable tragedy in the life of young Ruby Bronstein. Ruby’s father is a Holocaust survivor who cannot remember most of his own childhood; as a young girl she is haunted by the contrast between her family’s warmth and closeness and her father’s silences and occasional withdrawal. Hermann approaches the familiar subject of the Holocaust and its legacies in a completely unexpected and original way, inflicting on her protagonist a series of tragedies that give readers the barest taste of what it means to face and survive unimaginable catastrophe. Early on, Ruby goes with her parents to the prison camp where her father was interred. The events and epiphanies of this sequence might be the crux of another novel, but instead, the trip is the last moment in Ruby’s life before she begins to lose one family member after another to madness and illness. The uncanny repetition of these traumas could easily have strayed into the territory of melodrama, but Hermann’s spare, taut prose strips the story of any sentimentality even as it tensely mirrors Ruby’s tamped-down emotions. The potential for melodrama is further mediated by the novel’s rigorous structure. A series of compressed episodes, any one of which could stand on its own as a short story, chronicle Ruby’s ordinary life as an adolescent and young woman: going to a new school, making and losing friends, experiencing her first crushes, savoring the joys of camp and the first years of college. They delicately illustrate the ways in which grief circumscribes her life and her ability to connect to those she loves, including her surviving family. The novel’s resolution doesn’t quite match the depth and complexity that precede it, but this is an easy fault to forgive in such a gorgeously readable meditation on mourning and survival.

Profound, poetic and original. Hermann is a young author to watch.

Publishers Weekly:

The only girl in the strong, loving Bronstein family, nine-year-old Ruby anchors this adept debut from Hermann. Ruby has always felt both admiration for and rejected by her three charismatic older brothers; she is similarly intrigued by her Holocaust survivor father, whose observance of Jewish customs persists despite his professed loss of faith. Ruby’s own sense of faith, family and self will be sorely tested over the next 10-plus years: her oldest brother Abe’s schizophrenic break, a truly frightening event to 10-year-old Ruby, is but the first in a series of crises. The well-developed chapters have a tendency to read like individual stories, but Hermann keeps the novel’s themes of loss and resiliency constant. Foreshadowing and symbolism get heavy, but what could have become a litany of family pain is tempered, in Hermann’s eminently capable narrative, by young Ruby’s concurrent journey toward self-discovery.

Booklist:

[T]he book is inarguably well written and clearly deeply felt by its author. Accordingly, readers who enjoy serious...literary fiction will embrace it.

Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother:

THE CURE FOR GRIEF is a searingly beautiful, stunning debut, saturated in the lyricism of loss and mourning yet rooted in the everyday. The book's sadness is irradiated by a wild hope as the characters take their places among the living; we are drawn in by the force of their sorrow, but elevated by their rich and complex attachments to each other, the past, the future, and their own inner lives.

Shira Nayman, author of Awake in the Dark:

The Cure for Grief is a profound and thrilling achievement—an exemplar of the reason books should be written and read.  Nellie Hermann is wise beyond her years, though to say this is to miss the point—that all great artists float beyond age and outside of time.  The Cure for Grief is a coming-of-age story that reaches far beyond its subject; it shimmers with clarity and grace, fulfilling the deepest of literature’s promises—drawing us into a searing, riveting world, punching us with emotion, revealing the most secret truths of the soul.  Her vision is that of the seer, whose illuminating beam might help the reader learn how better to live.