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Top of the pile
98
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
100/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Rob Delaney
Publisher:
Spiegel & Grau
Date:
November 29, 2022
In 2016, Rob Delaney's one-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Amid the hospital routine, surgeries, and brutal treatments, they found a newfound community of nurses, aides, caregivers, and fellow parents contending with the unthinkable. Two years later, Henry died, and his family watched their world fall away to reveal the things that matter most.
What The Reviewers Say
Memoirs by grieving parents obviously have some similarities; what makes the best of them unique is each writer’s voice. I was reminded, up to a point, of Jayson Greene’s magnificent memoir about his young daughter’s death, Once More We Saw Stars. But A Heart That Works is a book about grief as only Delaney could write it. Indeed, it is the work of a more mature writer than the one who published his first memoir in 2013.
From the start, everything is narrated from a present tense in which Henry is already gone; just as in life, where grief explodes and warps time, everything feels incredibly close one second and unbearably far away the next.
To those who have felt the icy grip of grief around their own throats, it is a relief to read an account of grief that is not a series of hard-won life lessons wrapped in a gratitude journal.
... it gives me great pleasure, and no pleasure at all, to write that Rob Delaney’s new book is both overwhelmingly moving and, in any other way you might assess a book, excellent.
