Grief is the thing with feathers: A novel, by Max Porter

I include the subtitle, “A Novel,” purposefully.  It is seldom I happen across a novel that is truly unique without being just intentionally odd.  I was convinced for some time must be a memoir or strongly autobiographical.  Or a long poem.  Or, well, who knows what.  At just over 100 pages of widely spaced type, it can be read in an hour or so.  But like a poem, you can’t just skim through it to find out how the plot comes out. There isn’t one.  A husband comes home to find his wife, the mother of his two young sons, dead from an accidental fall from a ladder.  Over the course of time, he and the children learn to live with this grief.  The dad is visited by Crow – a trickster, a symbol, the subject of Ted Hughes' famous collection of poems by the same name?  All of the above.  114 pp.