Shadowchild: A Meditation On Love And Loss by P.F. Thomese, translated by Sam Garrett 116 pages Farrar, Straus & Giroux June 2005 Hardcover     Dutch novelist P.F. Thomese writes movingly and sparingly in this beautiful, brief memoir of the loss of his infant daughter to a brain hemorrhage. Each concise chapter is a testament of love for his child, pain at her loss, and the confusion of life as it now is for Thomese and his wife. Thomese talks about the confusion of love after a loss with a lyricism other books on grief could not begin to touch. “Does love disappear when the person disappears? Where does the love go when the body is burned to ashes? It flees into similes. The body has been taken from the earth, but not all the things that remind you of it.” Later, he writes on attempting to find the right language to help him manage in this new world of grief: “And there is something else as well. That’s the matter of language, the matter of communicability. You know it, but not how to go about saying it. The tongue gropes across the palate in vain. All the words you find seem borrowed, not applicable. What’s going on is not ‘something like.’ There are no precedents to follow.” For anyone dealing with grief and loss, each chapter of this wonderful little book is a moving meditation on uncharted territory. Without sentimentality or overstatement, Thomese captures the uncertainties and pain of a grief-filled life; he gives words to the little-charted agonies of life after a child’s death, and he does it with incredible grace and dignity. Shadowchild is the book many a grieving parent will wish they had been able to write themselves.   web reviews   Virginia Williams/2006 for curled up with a good kid's book   For grown-up fiction, nonfiction and speculative fiction book reviews, visit our sister site Curled Up With a Good Book (www.curledup.com)