EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, how I would know I was dead is just that

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT
BEN REEVES
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.

Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember Meet Joe Black? Or, if you're a reader my age, Salley Vickers' novel Mr. Golightly's Holiday? We're all interested in divine personifications of absolute power...god and death being in Western cosmology the two supreme beings...and we need to tell stories as much as we need to breathe, so it's inevitable that there will always be new and interesting ways to personify them. (And funny ones, if you're irreverent like Sir Terry Pratchett. Author Ben Reeves is staking out a bit of that territory in this story.

Travis is an ordinary guy who also happens to be Death. Literal Death. The Grim Reaper wears jeans and t-shirts. Sure, why not. Travis comforts and guides people into death, so you already know it's not going to be a Pratchetty jollification of a story. Seeing the personification of death as more or less a death doula is, on its face, reductive because Death is permanent, absolute, fundamental, and utterly unknowable like Life is. Reducing a terrifying cosmic power to a guy in jeans and a t-shirt who helps you, guides you with kindness and sympathy, through the emotional landscape of The End, feels like lèse-majesté to me. Like euphemising "he died" into "he has passed away," if feels like emotional dishonesty to me, like a pointless attempt to pre-feel the horrible twisting agony that is grief. (It doesn't work, any more than not saying "Voldemort" did. Any time one uses the passive voice, dishonesty is stinking up the sentence.)
Enough abstraction. The action in this story is heavy, the emotions surrounding death are never otherwise though sadness is not necessarily always foregrounded. Author Reeves chose, rightly in my view, to give Travis a first-person narrative voice in stream of consciousness style. It is how we experience life, so why wouldn't Life's intimate partner use it? It's also effective in conveying the immediacy of Death's role in one's life by distancing our mere mortal PoVs into third-person limited narratives.

I think that won't sit well with some readers, but it very much worked for me. It made the stakes so clear: at the end of life, Death is the main character. He (in this case) looms large, his thoughts and his emotional investment in us are all mortals have in that transition. It was a very interesting take, one I don't recall seeing in a novel before. (A dim, distant tocsin sounds about a short story set during a pogrom in Ukraine—anyone else hear it?)

What made this creative and intelligent Death-centered story so interesting to me was the clear intent to elicit powerful responses in the reader was never shortchanged by pulled punches. I find the central conceit just a bit dimmed down for softening sharp edges; but within that mild criticism of intentional diminishment of robustness, the action isn't kinetic to make the story external. It's a story of the interiority of death, as experienced and related to us by Death.

It's a superior read, told by a talented storyteller, in a creative way that enhances its message of coping with emotion at te end of life.

THE JINN DAUGHTER, death magic, motherhood, and one very ill Death

THE JINN DAUGHTER
RANIA HANNA
Hoopoe Books|American University in Cairo Press
$17.95 trade paperback, available now

20% Off when ordered on their website! Just enter promo code: summer24 at checkout. Valid until 10 August 2024 in North America, the Uk, Europe, and (naturally) Egypt.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother’s struggle to save her only daughter

Nadine is a jinn tasked with one job: telling the stories of the dead. She rises every morning to gather pomegranate seeds—the souls of the dead—that have fallen during the night. With her daughter Layala at her side, she eats the seeds and tells their stories. Only then can the departed pass through the final gate of death.

But when the seeds stop falling, Nadine knows something is terribly wrong. All her worst fears are confirmed when she is visited by Kamuna, Death herself and ruler of the underworld, who reveals her desire for someone to replace her: it is Layala she wants.

Nadine will do whatever it takes to keep her daughter safe, but Kamuna has little patience and a ruthless drive to get what she has come for. Layala’s fate, meanwhile, hangs in the balance.

Rooted in Middle Eastern mythology, Rania Hanna deftly weaves subtle, yet breathtaking, magic through this vivid and compelling story that has at its heart the universal human desire to, somehow, outmaneuver death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mythology that tantalizes with its familiar outlines, and its very intriguing shifts, is always going to get my attention. Nadine has a very unusual job as a Hakawati jinn who must tell the story of the dead before their spirit can move to the next world. This is very appealing to me, as the medium of delivery is pomegranate seeds that fall from the sky. This use of the many-cultural pomegranate as a deliverer of information about the dead in its very numerous, sweet-fleshed seeds seemed like it should be used in more myths!

Demeter and Persephone add their cultural mite to the familiarity stakes as Nadine, our jinn mother, needs to keep her daughter from being drafted to assume the role of the soul-sickened, dying, Death. I don't guess any mom wants her little girl to grow up into a being universally feared and loathed. The tension seemed logical if overplayed: In the quest to save her half-human child from becoming Death, Nadine takes us through an afterlife of surprising charm and a weird kind of gentleness. I guess when Death and her court are female, that is what happens...? As a side note, the men here are one-dimensional walk-ons. I was fine with that, others might not be.

I kept thinking that Death sounded like a fine ruler, where do I go to learn necromancy? Nadine was way ahead of me. Lots of the stories in this very literary fantasy novel center on death as a bargain, making deals, and the like. That is not really something I think is factual, but this being fiction not religion I have no kick with it. The book is short enough that its one note, Motherlove, does not become tiresome. She needs to make some hefty decisions with serious consequences to keep her daughter safe, including the hail-mary pass of digging up her dead partner's horrible father, but in the end only truly good people can help Nadine do good things.

Does it all make sense? Not to me; but I am a cynical old man who thinks the job of being Death sounds spiffing. There is a lot of time spent doing the same thing a couple different ways...go with it. Be in the flow of the story. I recommend this quiet, loving story for US mother's day, as a gift or as a celebration of a deeply missed Mom.