Review of Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen

Nguyen offers a novel inspired by real life about the loss of a child and the deep, paralyzing grief that follows; this tragicomedy has dark humor and messy, realistic-feeling paths toward finding greater peace without minimizing sorrow.

Cleo and her best friend since childhood, Paloma, live down the street from each other and are ecstatic to be pregnant with their first children at the same time. They have a joint baby shower, discuss all of their pregnancy woes, compare baby products--and they even give birth on the same day.

But Paloma and her husband happily bring their new son home, while Cleo and Ethan find themselves in a nightmare of grief: their daughter Daisy dies at the hospital soon after birth. Cleo and Ethan's world is turned upside down.

Nguyen plunges the reader into Cleo's grief, her sometimes socially unacceptable methods of getting through each day, and, much to her family's horror, her pivot from actuarial work to employment at the funeral home where Daisy's service was held.

Cleo takes a zigzagging, destructive, uncomfortable, cathartic, despairing, and often gallows-humor-fed path through the depths of her grief to a place where she can function again, holding her grief a little more lightly but prepared to always keep it close.

Characters surprise each other, and while the tone of the novel assures the reader that many issues will be resolved, we know that Cleo's loss cannot be reversed.

Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead is darkly funny, moving, honest, messy, and lovely.

In her author's note, Nguyen shares that her own loss of a child led her to write this novel.

I received a prepublication audiobook edition of Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio and Libro.fm.

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Mai Nguyen is also the author of Sunshine Nails.

Other novels that are darkly humorous tragicomedies with somewhat of a similar tone to this one include The Wedding People and Margo's Got Money Troubles, both of which I loved.