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My heart ached while reading Claire Oshetsky’s “Poor Deer��. Oshetsky uses an innocent 4-year-old girl, Bunny, to show the weight and complexity of grief mixed with guilt. How can a 4-year-old feel guilty? Is that not an adult emotion and children be guileless?

Bunny and her best friend, Agnes, go out to play on a rainy day. Neither girl is highly monitored by their parents. Agnes is the braver of the two; Bunny is far more hesitant, insecure, and uncertain. After a game that Agnes designs that afternoon, Agnes is found dead in a tool shed and Bunny is found under her dining room table, as is her habit most days. A permeating question throughout the story is, who is to blame? Who is at fault? What happened?

The story begins with Bunny, aka Margaret, writing a confession that Poor Deer resolutely provokes her to write.

“Stop stalling-it’s time to confess what you did on the day of the schoolyard flood��, says Poor Deer. In third person, the story unfolds. Yes, this is a tragic story. Oshetsky shows, through her naïve protagonist, how guilt and grief can combine to such an extent that it’s difficult to untangle, and process, especially when there is no one there to help, to guide you. Bunny created Poor Deer in her young mind. When the towns people learned of Agnes�� fate, the response was, Poor Dear. In Bunny’s world, Poor Deer becomes her guilt, which such a young mind cannot process.

Oshetsky’s prose is reason enough to read this story. My favorite passages:

**She works at the downtown lunch counter, where she gives free pie slices to all the single men, because she still has ambition.

**Shame was a new feeling for her. She had learned it from her mother.

**She isn’t scared of me. She isn’t scared of anything. No doubt she is going to grow up to become somebody interesting.

**Ever since the day of the school yard flood, a wild urge had come over her body to hide itself away inside, narrow places, or to hurl itself into dangerous ones.

**One day you’ll need to learn manners, or no one will marry you.

**A little seed had planted itself in her head by then, about what might have happened on the day of the schoolyard flood and the seed was sprouting swiftly and growing, strong, toxic roots, and naughty vines.

From the above passages, one can discern that Bunny didn’t come from a healthy family. This toxic cocktail makes for a tragic situation that broke my heart. Yet I was mesmerized by this story, which illuminated to me how messy grief is. II provided me with an unusual viewpoint of how isolating grief can be.

I highly recommend this contemplative novel. I read to learn, to understand humanity. Oshetsky accomplished that goal for me.