Survive an Ancient Sorrow is an intimate tale of love, grief, obsession, and betrayal—set against a backdrop of salt-slick decks, jungle rivers, and a restless Caribbean horizon. It follows the narrator’s fevered relationship with Rita, a magnetic woman with the soul of a sailor and the scars to prove it. What starts as a lusty encounter on a docked sloop spirals into a jagged, doomed love story wrapped in the trappings of high-seas adventure and mythic melancholy. Rita dies early in the book, and everything that follows is a storm of memory, regret, and the aching need to understand why.

Greenwald doesn’t just write. He bleeds onto the page. The language is lush, visceral, and often startling in its bluntness. There’s a kind of poetry in how he describes Rita: “She could kiss with her mind,” he writes in the prologue, and that line alone told me this wasn’t going to be a standard love story. The voice feels lived-in, battered by the sea and years, full of dark humor and aching loss. He shifts from gritty details—like the squelch of bunker oil and the stink of a rotting skiff—to gorgeous lines that stop you in your tracks. It’s a chaotic mix, but it works.

The story isn’t told in a straight line, which I liked. It loops, wanders, lingers where it hurts the most. Greenwald doesn’t shy away from the ugliness—Rita’s downward spiral, her moments of despair, her complicated relationship with sex and survival. The scene where the narrator finds her body under the porch was so vividly rendered, so quiet and awful, I had to put the book down. And yet, just pages later, we’re in the wildness of their first meeting, full of fire and flirtation and grilled ribs. The emotional whiplash is intense but feels earned. That’s how memory works. That’s how loss works.

Rita herself is unforgettable. She’s not just a character—she’s a storm. Smart, broken, sensuous, maddening. She’s got big “stay away” energy, but you still find yourself inching closer. Her spiritual connection to her Nez Pierce roots, her deep relationship with the sea, her refusal to be anyone’s possession—all of it made her more than just a tragic figure. Even in her lowest moments, she had this defiant grace. And the author doesn’t let us turn away. He forces us to look at what it means to love someone wild and self-destructive, and how that kind of love can wreck you in ways you never recover from.

Sometimes it reads like a confession, sometimes like a drunken letter, sometimes like a howl into the wind. But it feels real. If you’ve ever loved someone you couldn’t save, or lost someone you couldn’t forget, this book will find you. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes stories that cut deep and don’t apologize—readers who want romance with salt and blood in it, who don’t mind the mess.