I cried multitudinous rivers whilst reading this. “How to Make Friends with the Dark” is a novel about love, loss, grief, and learning how to pick up with your life when it feels like you're surrounded by darkness. Whilst the book is incredibly sad, it explores important concepts and a realistic approach to how it feels when your life crumbles apart. Most books I have read on this topic cease to delve into how it really feels to lose someone you love. A full, shiny, 5 star rating from me. I loved it so much more than “Girl in Pieces”. ( )

It’s always been Tiger and her Mom, until, one day, it’s only Tiger and she has no idea what to do. Since she doesn’t know anything about her birth father, Tiger begins the process of bouncing from home to home. So now, she not only has to process the grief of her mother’s death, but also the constant changes in her environment. This book is about love, loss, grief, and family.

I lost my dad when I was 12. He was hit by a car while finishing fixing a pot hole at work. It’s been 16 years and not a day goes by where I don’t think of him. This book made my heart twist so tight, it brought up a lot of memories of how I handled it. I had tears streaming down my cheeks by the end of it.

Kathleen Glasgow captured that raw, empty feeling I felt as a 12 year old kid once I found out what happened to my dad.

“You feel skinned. Like whatever held you together has been peeled away. You half expect to look down and see your heart hanging out, a slow-beating, nearly dead thing.”

I never really knew how to handle my dad’s death that young. I was one of those kids who had a lot of anger. Like Tiger, I tend to have a bit of PTSD if I can’t get a hold of a loved one quickly, or if I don’t know if my boyfriend made it work safely I immediately have high anxiety. Tiger and other kids talk a lot about what to do with her parents’ items, especially their clothing. My family went through boxes of Dad’s stuff for the first time just this past Christmas Eve, it was still so hard.

Grief is a process you constantly have to go through. Glasgow mentions it in so many different ways in this book and I nodded my head at each one, thinking of my own. Like smells... warm asphalt smells like my dad after work... and what to do with their clothes, how to handle no longer having them around.

This book is such a raw look into the grieving process that one especially goes through as a young person and what that can lead to. This book will most likely make you cry, sometimes it's what you need in a book, sometimes it's not. But I do highly suggest this book to anyone who's experienced a close death (especially the loss of a parent), and those who are/were younger when it happened. It lets you know you're not alone in your feelings. ( )

One of the very few books that had me crying the whole, frigging, time. I loved it! ( )

Damn I found this book “unputdownable”...and so scary and heartbreaking.

The story was just so sad but yet seemed so real… Like how quickly something could happen to any of us and what kind of situation will your children have to then face. Hopefully the majority of us are in a better situation to begin with overall but it really makes you stop and think. I found the majority of the characters likable, with the exception of a select few parents, and the behavior of the kids at school was pretty right on. Now the sister should’ve probably been a character that we didn’t care for but she was so cool that you can’t help but like her.

I’d like to think happy endings for all. ( )

This book was so good, it was sad, it was heartwarming, it was happy. It made me feel a lot of emotions and made me appreciate how much I have and how much more fortunate than most people, and it made me remember to never take my family for granted because you never know when they can disappear in an instant. Some chapters were so emotional and sad that I would get really sad and cry a little. The way that she described Tiger’s emotions and showed Tiger remembering moments with her mom made me sad because it was too detailed not to make me sad. I enjoyed how Tiger got a fresh start at the end, she was no longer being bounced around in the system she finally had a family with her sister and she could start over. The story was so interesting that it made me never want to put it down, I would read 15 pages then I would be so interested that I would ready 40 more after that. In the book at the start of every chapter it would say how many days, hours and minutes it’s been since her mother died. That really showed me how slowly time passes when a loved one dies, and how hard it was for Tiger to get through those days. I would really recommend this book to someone who enjoys sad books because it was a really strong piece. ( )