Grievers: Grievers Trilogy, Book 1 (Black Dawn)

By adrienne maree brown

"It's a strong precedent that will leave readers eager for more." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

Dune's mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks--in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life--casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit's hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit's history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

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Published Sep 7, 2021

208 pages

Average rating: 6

4 RATINGS

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Community Reviews

Seráh Blain
Jun 30, 2026
4/10 stars
I struggled to finish this one, which surprised me given how much I love adrienne maree brown's writing in general. Her nonfiction is absolutely outstanding, so engaging and intimate, incredibly readable and wise. And I've enjoyed several of her short stories. This book, however, didn't engage me the same way. It had a lot of telling rather than showing, with brown listing facts, details, and backstory, rather than helping us experience the characters and the story through our senses. She relies a lot on the geography of Detroit — she will list a landmark or cross-street as a primary descriptor, but for those of us who have never been to Detroit, these references don't really contribute to a vision of the setting. This is in contrast to her Detroit-centered short story, The River, which crafted a clear picture of the city and allowed me to connect fully with the setting. I wonder if this might have been more successful as a short story, with brown editing down the exposition and distilling the important details?

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