Jane Yolen is always a thoughtful and somewhat poetic writer, and those are both true for this short novel which tells the story of first contact between what appear to be Earth-originating anthropologists and the natives of the planet known as Henderson's IV, in the year 2132. The story is told through a series of recordings taken by the visiting ship, each one being an interview with either one of the natives or one of the anthropologists. Together they tell the story of the first contact and what went right and wrong; they also show us more about the culture, world, and belief systems of the native inhabitants, who refer to their world as the Land of the Grievers. Their culture is built around grief and mourning; and the main character in the book is the Gray Wanderer, a woman who is by profession a griever who ensures the dead are remembered.

It's an interesting picture of an alien culture and beautifully told, although the titular cards of grief don't even show up until the very last chapter and seem almost an afterthought; I wished they'd played a bigger part in the story and had time to be described in more detail. Overall though it felt a little more like a sketch of a story than a fully satisfying tale in its own, more like the retelling of a novel than the novel itself. If I recommend one novel by Jane Yolen it's generally "Briar Rose", and that still remains my favourite of her adult novels.