A review by bekkabergamot
The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown

5.0

"The Gifts of the Body" by Rebecca Brown presents an insight into caregiving for terminal AIDS patients. The narrator, of the intersecting short stories, exposes a mixture of empathy and revulsion towards the certain and painful death looming over all of her charges. While each section, or story, is labeled by a different “gift” of the human body Brown represents the manner in which illness strips away these luxuries. The duality of the term gift presents parts of human anatomy and existence that many overlook until they are lost, or more aptly until nature takes back these gifts. Namely the gifts of: sweat, wholeness, tears, skin, hunger, mobility, death, speech, sight, hope and finally mourning are expressed within the book. The book leaves its characters and its readers the gift of mourning, the tangible and necessary step after facing the representation of loss. Rebecca Brown’s book portrays the personal face of suffering and disease whilst sharing the fragility of the human form.