Emma Scott’s Reviews > The Goldfinch > Status Update

God this book is so beautiful and so sad. I love it so much.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking over a brackish wreck, which was illuminated in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

Sentences like this are why this was the first fiction book I could actually read after Izzy died.

I want to read this book forever.

...And that was just something I was going to have to live with, the sadness of loving someone I couldn’t have...

This book is about grief in all its varying forms which is probably why it resonates so deeply with me.

Also, it’s just really effing good.

There was a great, seductive loneliness in the hum, a summons almost, like the call of the sea, and for the first time I understood the impulse that had driven my dad to cash out his bank account, pick up his shirts from the cleaners, gas up the car, and leave town without a word.