What This Theme Explores
Family and Found Family asks what truly binds people together when blood ties fail or fracture. For Tiger Tolliver, “family” begins as an intimate, two-person world with her mother, June, where love and dependence are indistinguishable. June’s sudden death explodes that certainty, forcing Tiger to test whether care can be chosen, built, and sustained outside biology. The novel ultimately argues that family is not a fixed unit but a living network—part inheritance, part commitment—that learns to hold grief without collapsing.
How It Develops
At first, Tiger’s life is an airtight duet with June, defined by small rituals and a fierce protectiveness that makes their household feel complete—so complete it leaves little room for anyone else. The stability of Cake Rishworth and her parents offers a warm but unsettling mirror: another kind of family exists, one that is open, social, and porous, yet Tiger’s world remains sealed by June’s vigilance and secrecy.
After June dies, that seal breaks and Tiger is pulled into the foster care system, where impermanence is the rule and affection must be negotiated rather than assumed. In LaLa’s house, Tiger forms sibling-like bonds—especially with Thaddeus Roach—that teach her how care can circulate among people who owe each other nothing and yet still show up. At school, the Grief Group, shepherded by Walrus Jackson and filled with peers like Mae-Lynn Carpenter and Lupe Hidalgo, becomes a laboratory for honesty, where vulnerability—not lineage—becomes the credential for belonging.
The late reveal of Tiger’s biological ties reopens the question of what counts as “real” family. Meeting her incarcerated father, Dustin "Dusty" Franklin, and half-sister, Shayna Lee Franklin, confronts her with loyalties she didn’t know she had and responsibilities she didn’t choose. The ending refuses an easy hierarchy: Tiger leans on her chosen community to navigate the risk and promise of her rediscovered kin, and with Shayna, she begins building a new unit that is equal parts blood, choice, and hard-earned trust.
Key Examples
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Tiger and June’s sealed unit: Their mantra—“a well-oiled, good-looking, and good-smelling machine”—captures a love so complete it borders on containment. This closeness nurtures Tiger but also isolates her, setting up the devastation when the family’s entire structure rests on one person and that person is gone.
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Found siblings in foster care: In LaLa’s home, Tiger, Thaddeus, Sarah, and Leonard trade stories not as gossip but as currency for trust, turning a temporary placement into a fragile community. Leonard’s metaphor reframes their lives as shaken snow globes—chaotic, disordered, and yet still beautiful when viewed whole:
“Thaddy says we’re just stories in somebody’s book and every time they turn a page, that’s when new stuff happens. But I think we’re like one of those snow balls. You know, shake ’em up and everything gets all messed up and the snowflakes cover everything and nothing goes back where it was.” The image normalizes instability while validating the meaning they create together inside it.
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The Grief Group as chosen kinship: Mae-Lynn’s blunt welcome—“Welcome to the Big Suck. It’s going to be really bad.”—names the reality no adult can fix. The group’s candor becomes a kind of shelter, proving that truth-telling and witness can bind people as tightly as tradition.
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Shayna’s shift from stranger to sister: What begins as legal obligation becomes ethical commitment when Shayna defends Tiger at school and pledges, “I’m in it to win it, Tiger.” The moment marks a pivot from paperwork to promise, showing how a biological tie matures into a chosen alliance.
Character Connections
Tiger Tolliver: Tiger’s grief forces her to diversify the idea of family: from a single point of attachment to a network of care. Her movement—from resisting help to accepting it, to reciprocating it—tracks the novel’s thesis that belonging is both received and made.
June Tolliver: June embodies love’s protective instinct pushed to the edge of secrecy and control. Her orphan history fuels her determination to keep Tiger close, but her withheld truths about Tiger’s father and sister reveal how even fierce love can narrow a child’s world.
Shayna Lee Franklin: Shayna is the hinge between blood and choice. She enters as kin by law and history, but becomes family through action—advocacy, caretaking, and a willingness to learn Tiger’s rhythms rather than impose her own.
Cake Rishworth: Cake represents the durability of chosen bonds that predate tragedy. By offering food, rides, and unfiltered presence, she demonstrates that family is what persists when life rearranges itself—and what expands to accommodate those rearrangements.
Symbolic Elements
The Jellymobile: The hand-painted truck is the moving emblem of Tiger and June’s self-made unit—work, survival, and identity welded together. When Tiger and Shayna begin repairing it, the project becomes a bridge between past and future, reclaiming a shared inheritance while rewriting what “we” means.
The House at 344 Morales Road: Once a sanctuary, the house’s disrepair mirrors Tiger’s internal collapse after June’s death. Leaving it for Tucson is both loss and liberation—a choice to honor memory without being entombed by it.
The Boxes of Mom’s Ashes: Tiger’s “Boxes of Mom” literalize the fragmentation of her old life. Carrying them everywhere dramatizes the tension between holding on and moving forward, until integrating the loss—rather than transporting it—becomes the path to new belonging.
Contemporary Relevance
In a present where incarceration, foster care, migration, and economic precarity regularly splinter households, the novel models how adolescents craft kinship beyond pedigree. It affirms the legitimacy of support networks—friends, mentors, peer groups—that step in where institutions and traditional families falter. By depicting grief as communal work, it offers a pragmatic hope: stability can be assembled from honesty, reciprocity, and the courage to ask for help.
Essential Quote
“I’m in it to win it, Tiger.”
This declaration distills the book’s redefinition of family as commitment, not just connection. Spoken by Shayna at the threshold of their relationship, it transforms a tenuous biological link into a vow of presence, signaling that real kinship is a choice renewed in action.