I have to admit that this book did not quite go the way the blurb had me expecting. For one thing, I expected a lot more plot and a lot less inner dialogue. I suppose, though, when your main character is 16, you are going to end up with a lot of Emotions and Feelings and Confusion. All of those were portrayed quite well. Winifred Blight is one very complicated young adult and her natural neurodivergence is not supported or accomodated by her surroundings. For one thing, her dad is indeed only half-alive and doing a piss-poor job of parenting. Let's not even touch on the rest of her environment. She tugs at your heart strings even as you also cringe because we never like being reminded how we were at her age. The loneliness, the grief that you can't comprehend, the embarrassment, the family that is both vitally important and hugely embarrassing. The first love and the wrong love and the right love and the loss of all three before you turn 17.

Dimaline's prose is lush and poetic and paints lavish pictures. Strangely, this is part of the problem that I had with the book. It is first person POV and those word choices, those tones, do not match Winifred or any 16 year old. Even a strange one. It pushed me out of the story and pulled me back in, wanting to get lost in the words but unable to keep from thinking "this is overblown blowsy nonsense that is not Winifred." It posed a real problem. It also distracted from the plot, letting things wander down pretty paths of mood and emotion (all well done and inspiring) before realizing that you really had not gone anywhere. I suspect I would have loved the prose and plot more if they had been combined in a short story. In fact, the entire story could probably have been more effectively delivered as a short story or novella. it would have felt tighter and more coherent and less indulgent.

So I liked it and I quite liked some aspects but I don't feel the need to read it again except certain lovely phrases. I'm just glad it ended with a light in the darkness. Winifred deserves that.

“If my mother were to haunt the most suitable thing here, it would be those quiet divots between songs on her records, sending Morse code messages in the cracks and pops of the speaker. Instead, she haunts my father, slipping over his ribs, filling his tear ducts, pulling him away, away, away…”

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls follows a young Indigenous girl named Winifred who lives in an apartment above a cemetery. Her father works there in the crematorium, and her mother, who died during childbirth, is buried out in the front yard. This macabre place is the only home Winifred has ever known—and it’s about to be ripped away from her due to her family’s financial struggles. However, one night while Winifred is wandering the cemetery, someone spots her and thinks she’s a ghost. Suddenly, the place is swamped with tourists and fame. All Winifred has to do to keep the money rolling in is keep up the ruse that the cemetery is haunted—and then one night, she realizes that it actually is.

This novel tackles a lot of difficult topics within its short page count. Dimaline takes readers on a literary journey that explores grief, identity, family, and isolation through the lens of a lonely and independent 16-year-old girl. I could relate to Winifred in a lot of ways, and seeing her struggle to navigate a world where she is perceived as “weird” reminded me of my middle school and high school years. Readers who feel out of place or lack a sense of community will really resonate with Winifred’s struggles in this novel. In addition to the complex characterization of Winifred, Dimaline’s writing is lyrical and haunting. The creepy, atmospheric descriptions of the cemetery made me feel like I had been teleported to a graveyard in the dead of night. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys gorgeous prose and coming-of-age stories with a macabre backdrop and a few ghosts.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book early. While I haven’t had the chance to read Dimaline’s previous books, this book has definitely convinced me to start. While this story is a supernatural fantasy, this book quickly reveals itself to be a reflection of reality. A young girl comes of age one hazy summer and roams the cemetery next door when suddenly she befriends the ghost of a girl similar in age whose death remains a mystery. Suddenly, Winifred has to confront her past, her mother’s death, and what she imagines life, death, and love to really be. Winifred is an incredible new YA voice that I hope others will come to know and love.

I really wanted to like this book more but I just couldn’t. The fat-shaming, and obvious OCD that wasn’t labeled really bothered me. It was an interesting exploration of how different people deal with grief, and I liked how an actual ghost showed up that wasn’t just Winnifred wandering in the cemetery. This book could have been so much better than it actually was.

This book was unfortunately not a good fit for me. I do think the author is a talented writer and there is an audience that would enjoy this book. However, it didn't fit my personal taste. I liked the story premise and some of the themes that seem to come up, but I found it really hard to connect with or even care about any of the characters, and I wasn't picking up on a strong plot that kept me grounded. I was a little confused as to what was going on a few times. One of my biggest issues was that I found the story unnecessarily vulgar which just made it hard to stay into it. But for readers who like Dimaline's sort of writing and storytelling style, I think they might like the different ways that grief is portrayed, which did still come through for me.

What worked for me
-Unique and captivating writing style
-grief and loss based premise
-excellent character development
What didn't work as well for me
-This book need several trigger warnings especially revolving around sexual misconduct
-Dialogue felt stilted at times though that may just be part of the characters grief experience.
who I would recommend this book for
Funeral songs for Dying Girls will be a good read for fans of YA coming of age stories looking for something that speaks to the experience of living on after a loss.

I received this book for free from netgalley for an honest opinion

Damn this book kept me on my edge of my seat for the entire week. The character development was really great.

Dimaline has such a unique writing style that always captures my attention and whisks me in her stories. Funeral Songs for Dying Girl tells us a story about Winifred, a young girl experiencing grief from the loss of her mother, a motherly aunt and an emotionally absent father. The way the author delicately writes about the different ways of grieving was a wonderful read. We also experience the main character struggling with her identity and where she belongs in life, a common theme with people of all ages. I enjoyed how Dimaline incorporated the importance of Indigenous oral history and story telling seemlessly into this book as well. There are multiple elements of sexual and substance abuse and I personally wish there was a trigger warning to prepare readers for some of the heavier details discussed in this book.

I couldn’t quite tell if this book was supposed to be horror with some humour, or vice versa. This for me didn’t take away from the book, I wasn’t looking for a specific genre, I was looking forward to Dimaline’s writing once again.

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okay. OKAY. I fully enjoy the way Cherie Dimaline writes because her characters feel real.

Win's grief, over her mom, Jack, Phil, is so integral to her character. It's written into everything she does, how she thinks, but it doesn't define her. She lets it for a good chunk of the book before she chooses to let herself accept and grow beyond it. Her grief will never leave her and she will find it in unexpected ways but it's not the only thing about her.

(better review to come after the pub. date and I reread it.)

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!

I spent the entirety of this book wondering if I liked it or not, and overwhelmingly, I did.

The book follows the story of Winifred, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a cemetery with her father, and their overweight dog. The story builds around Winifred accidentally causing people to believe that the cemetery is haunted, and what follows around that. (Mind you, that is a very condensed synopsis.) Oh, and Winifred also meets a ghost named Phil.

The scene-building and storytelling in this book are beautiful. Dimaline uses language in a poetic way to make you feel as if you are there, and their descriptions of loss, trauma, and self-discovery spoke directly to me. The depth and story behind Phil are done beautifully and were the most engaging parts of the book to me. For those things alone I am really interested in reading more of their work, as this was the first book of theirs I have read. As I said, overwhelmingly I did enjoy it quite a bit. The story moved along well, and it ended satisfactorily.

However, for the first half of the book, I absolutely could not stand the main character, Winifred. I am not sure if it is just reading her through the eyes of an adult who parents teenagers or what, but I found her to be one of the most self-centered characters I have read in a long time. She does show growth, and by the end, I do like her more, but there were many points at the beginning where my dislike of her was such that I almost just didn't care what happened to her. The characters outside of Winifred and Phil felt incredibly flat. For example, there was nothing to her father other than his grief, or her great aunt other than being a sage older native woman.

The biggest issue that I had with the book was the use of what I assume is OCD as a character feature, but the refusal to name it. I say assume because over and over Winifred exhibits signs of strong compulsive tendencies, to the point of them impacting parts of her daily life, but they are presented more as a quirk that isn't actually addressed. In my opinion, if you are going to make so much of a character a reflection of a mental illness you are doing a disservice to the character and reader by not actually just coming out and saying that they have it. Then to have it seem in the end as if it has magically resolved as the story ties up just rings flat and disingenuous.

But let me reiterate again, after stating the negative, I did end up liking and enjoying the overall story, and I feel like I will probably give it another reread down the road to see if it grows on me more.

My favorite thing about this book is the main character, Winnie, and her neurodivergence. It doesn't detract from the plot at all, and I appreciate how it's included. I think it's hard to find books like this to recommend to teens, so I would definitely consider this one for reader's advisory.

“… how are we still living in a time when every book we study is written by a dead white guy?”


Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline
Publication Date - April 4, 2023

QUICK SUMMARY 🖊️
After accidentally starting rumours of the cemetery she lives in being haunted, Winifred makes friends with a ghost of a teen who lived and died in the ravine next to the cemetery. This leads Winifred to start asking questioning everything she knows about life, love and death.

FINAL THOUGHTS 💭
First, thank you Penguin Random House Canada & NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for my honest review.
I never thought I’d be saying this… this is the first book I think I would have rather had a physical to read or a multi narrator audio book.

The story it’s self is a beautiful one, but I found myself getting confused and losing interest because the dual timelines are not divided up, so we can’t tell which is the past and which is the present. I feel like there are going to be two groups for this one,
Love it or Hate it, and I think a big part of that is going to be the lack of division when we’re changing POVs

This book made me feel feelings I hadn't realize existed. I'm still gathering myself together, but one thing I *do* know is this: Cherie Dimaline can WRITE.

FUNERAL SONGS FOR DYING GIRLS contained some of the most beautiful, searing lines I've read this year. It was shatteringly sad, but also hilarious and self-deprecating and raw in places many books seem afraid to go. It's a ghost story, yes. But not the spooky kind. It's mostly a story about growing up between the cracks, kinda lost, grieving and yearning for impossible things.

As other readers have mentioned, there is some uncomfortable fatphobia I wish hadn't been present, so I did want to acknowledge that.

Overall, and incredible, category-defining book that has me clamoring for more from Dimaline.

I think I'm going to have to DNF this, based on other people's reviews of the book. While I really enjoyed Dimaline's "The Marrow Thieves," I'm not really enjoying this book. Many of the other reviews also state that there is a lot of fatphobia in this book, and while I've only seen a bit of it so far, it's enough for me to want to quit reading. This was one of my most anticipated books for this year, super sad about this

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. The premise of this story is so creative and unique. For me, the pacing and delivery fell flat. If you enjoy a more subtle, descriptive type of YA novel, you may enjoy it.

I had no idea what to expect from this book, but what it ended up being was a stunning look into a grieving girl and her father who has been devoured by his grief. The book is character based far more than plot based, though the pleut certainly had interesting twists and turns. The real focus is on our main character and how she navigates her relationships while really processing trauma.

There are supernatural/spiritual aspects of this book that are super fascinating and it was really captivating to see how things developed over time.

The setting is super cool because our main character and her father live at a cemetery!!? Most of the book takes place within the cemetery grounds, however we also see flashbacks from other places around there, which was really interesting.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and totally recommend it. I would say that it’s a YA coming of age story with supernatural elements here and there. The book wasn’t what I expected in the best way possible.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for sending and allowing me to read this book.
This was so good even though it took me a long time to actually pick it up and read it. The writing style couldn't get any better.

This is one of those books that I think people are going to love it or hate it. I didn't really mesh with the characters and the story was hit and miss at times. I don't think this is an author for me.

This story is beautiful and profound. The vulgarity is not to my taste, and I really feel like the story would have lost none of its impact if the strong language were absent. I have yet to finish "The Marrow Thieves;" it wasn't really my cup of tea, so I was a little apprehensive, but I liked this story much better. The writing style might have been overly poetic or unrealistic in another author's hands, but Dimaline utilizes it effortlessly, and I never once questioned the authenticity of Winifred's voice.

All the character beats hit for me - Win's recurring grief for the family members she's lost, and the changes in her friendship with Jack were portrayed with care and gentleness. It is interesting to me how a story with so many raw emotions going on could be so unobtrusive. This isn't to say that it wasn't affecting, but just that it was truly gentle. I think this is part of my 3.5 star rating - I liked it, but it kept a comparatively safe distance.

I'd recommend this for fans of Jeff Zentner. It was reminiscent of his powerful storytelling.

📖Review: Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Chérie Dimaline

This novel is a tense coming-of-age story about a girl, Winifred, who is learning how to overcome the cloud of grief that surrounds her and her father.

It’s the summer of humiliations, all starting with the first day of summer break when Winifred plans to convince her best friend to be more than friends. Between the embarrassment of this interaction, her dad’s silence, and discovering a ghost in the cemetery where she lives, Winifred has a lot going on.

Dimaline’s use of imagery and melding of the supernatural with the natural create an intriguing exploration into Winifred’s past, present, and self-worth. The suspense created with the ghostly encounters are visceral and reveal Dimaline’s skill with atmosphere and describing the unknown.

This story was a unique and haunting exploration of the ongoing trauma of grief as well as the power and healing that true love and connection can bring.

My personal experience with this book was first being impressed with Dimaline’s skill as a writer, but I also found this coming-of-age story a bit confusing at times. I found some aspects of the story difficult to immerse myself into, yet I very much liked the characters and found the exploration Winifred’s past and how it affected her approach to her present fascinating. Overall, I didn’t love the book as much as I thought I might, and I found the target age of the content difficult to confirm (teen protagonist but with a lot of sexual and drug related description). However, with a well-informed reader this could be the perfect examination of the difficult issues and conflicts explored.

Thank you to @penguinrandomhouse and @NetGalley for this ebook in return for an honest review.