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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2019, 432 pages
Paperback:
May 2020, 432 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Michelle Anya Anjirbag
Buy This Book
A novel about love and loss and learning how to continue when it feels like you're surrounded by darkness.
Here is what happens when your mother dies.
It's the brightest day of summer and it's dark outside. It's dark in your house, dark in your room, and dark in your heart. You feel like the darkness is going to split you apart.
That's how it feels for Tiger. It's always been Tiger and her mother against the world. Then, on a day like any other, Tiger's mother dies. And now it's Tiger, alone.
Here is how you learn to make friends with the dark.
I find the bills by accident, stuffed underneath a pile of underwear in the dresser my mother and I share. Instead of clean socks, my hands come away with a thick stack of envelopes marked Urgent, Last Notice, Contact Immediately.
My heart thuds. We don't have a lot, we never have, but we've made do with what my mom makes as the county Bookmobile lady and from helping out at Bonita's daycare. Come summer, we've got the Jellymobile, but that's another story.
You don't hide things in a drawer unless you're worried.
Mom's been on the couch since yesterday morning, cocooned in a black-and-red wool blanket, sleeping off a headache.
"Mom," I say, loudly. "Mommy."
No answer. I check the crooked clock on the wall. Forty minutes until zero period.
We're what my mom likes to call "a well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine." But I need the other half of my machine to beep and whir at me, and to do all that other stuff moms are supposed to do. If I don't have her, I don't have anything. It's...
Glasgow uses Tiger's gaze to look not only inward at her own grief, but through a wider lens to account for other kinds of grief, loss and pain too. The result is powerful, and a must-read for anyone who needs language with which to discuss loss...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).
In Kathryn Glasgow's How to Make Friends with the Dark, 16-year-old Tiger learns that her mother is dead, and almost equally upsetting, she can't even go somewhere familiar to stay while she figures out how to adjust to being an orphan; with no known father or other relatives, she is relegated to the legal responsibility of the state of Arizona and uprooted from the life and the people she knew. Though she is given a grace period of one night in her home, she is then taken to a series of foster homes. I think most readers will find the immediate removal of any agency from the teenager just as jarring as Tiger herself does. She is thrust out of the push and pull of normal adolescent rebellion with her mother into a situation that requires ...
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