Braddock Avenue Books
304 pages, $16

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Catherine Gammon’s Sorrow is an unapologetically dark book. In this case, you can almost judge the book by its cover, which shows slants of waning sunlight, a silhouette, and a fraction of a bed surrounded by darker and darker darkness. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

In her acknowledgments, Gammon reveals that she has structured her epilogue as Dostoevsky structured the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, and the flavor Sorrow conjures is the flavor I remember from a long-ago unit on existential literature in AP English my senior year of high school. Gammon nails the sense of epic despair to the point of despondency. Continue reading →