Will thus is a natural recruit to Gob's project: a machine that will resurrect all the dead from all wars.

What Gob manufactures is a "great nonsensical conglomeration of mechanical parts that sat under an enormous telescopic gaselier...glass tubes and iron gears, steel ribs, yards and yards of twisting, wrist-thick bundles of copper wire, here and there a bone." One part looks "like the gate to Greenwood Cemetery, complete with a gatehouse, and the whole thing sheltered under a pair of wings" made from the photographic negative plates that contain Will's horrifying images of the war.

Maci Trufant is the last active ingredient added to this volatile mix. She is a suffragist who works for Gob's mother, the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull. For Gob, however, science rather than politics ishis religion and his way of dealing with loss. He has become a doctor because he is obsessed with death. While initially repelled by Gob's work, Maci eventually is drawn into the resurrection effort (she, too, lost a brother to the fighting) yet remains the practical one among the three-Maci recognizes that the crazy endeavor is mostly about keeping the dead from being forgotten. She ultimately makes sense out of Gob's struggle against death and offers hope for the future as well as a way to reconcile the living with the dead.

Adrian is a medical student whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Story magazine. His writing in Gob's Grief can be beautiful and evocative at times, with compelling characters and strong attention to