Tom Is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq My rating: 5 of 5 stars No plot spoilers here … but then, if you are reading for plot, best look elsewhere. This is a quiet but trenchant meditation on the death of a loved one; in this case, the four year old son of the narrator, a woman whose name we never learn. Her personal circumstances are revealed to us bit by bit, filtered through her complex grief, so that reading the book feels as if we are intruding on someone’s private journals or personal letters to a close friend. The writing parallels the narrator’s emotional experience in its tone, vacillating between numbness, detachment, guilt, longing, rage, and raw anguish. I felt as if I were…