The Grieving Eye by Lena Atoug is a memoir focusing mainly on her childhood to very early adulthood. Two crucial events—the death of her father, and her migration brought on by her country’s war—are the drivers of her story.
I’ll start by saying that I am not really a huge biography/memoir reader, but the cover of the book really caught my eye. There is some beautiful writing, very lyrical and emotional sentences. Over the course of the book, you can really feel how much she misses her father, and her loneliness as she loses her country as well. While I liked individual chapters, I didn’t really connect that well with it overall, even with a parental loss during childhood myself. I think other than the writing itself, I just did not find the story particularly unique. Certainly, not every child loses a parent at a young age or has to go through war and going to a new country, but among those children and refugees, I would imagine that they would all feel much the same as this describes. This “everyman” approach, while providing a universal commonality that many might relate to, dulled my connection a bit. There was never a wow moment or something super interesting to really engage me. That could also be why I typically don’t read this genre.
Still, I think that many readers would enjoy this based on the themes of loss, memory, loneliness, and family combined with the strength of the writing.
Thank you to NetGalley and Deixis Press for the eARC.
3.5 stars

There's some gorgeous, lyrical writing here but this also feels like a book that is treading very familiar ground: childhood, the loss of a father to an aneurysm, the war in the former Yugoslavia that leads to exile and loss - it feels a bit heartless to say that this is almost 'the' story of twentieth century into our current time and this book isn't adding anything new.