The Widow's Guide to Becoming a Handyman is part grief memoir, part immigrant story, and part how-to-guide. This is a story of premature death and emotional wreckage that uses the narrator's old house as its foundation. Grief is as palpable as a hammer hitting a nail and doesn't come at all the way a reader might expect as the narrator methodically cares for her quirky old farmhouse's many needs following her husband's sudden death: a leaky roof, rotten windows, mold and frozen pumps and pipes. The narrator repeatedly tries and fails to order grief into a linear process with five distinct stages, but instead finds grief to be as disorganized and messy as the garage and sheds full of tools left by her deceased husband.