How to Make Friends with the Dark by Kathleen Glasgow
At a Glance
- Genre: Contemporary YA; realistic grief narrative
- Setting: Present-day Mesa Luna, Arizona, and surrounding communities, including foster homes and juvenile detention
- Perspective: First-person narration from Tiger Tolliver
Opening Hook
Grief hits like a lightning strike and leaves a crater. When sixteen-year-old Tiger Tolliver shouts the worst thing she’s ever said to her mother, she believes there will be time to take it back. Hours later, June Tolliver dies suddenly, and Tiger is thrown into a world that has no exit door—only days to count since the “Before.” As she’s shuffled through strangers’ houses and the machinery of the state, Tiger hunts for anything that feels like love, or even like truth. The novel is a bruising, beautiful account of learning to live with the dark and still reach for the light.
Plot Overview
Before the Darkness
Tiger’s life with her single, fiercely protective mother, June Tolliver, is tender but tense. Money is tight in Mesa Luna, yet their small home is full of rituals, rules, and love. Tiger tests boundaries: she nurses a crush on her friend Kai Henderson, plays in a band with her best friend Cake Rishworth, and endures school torment from Lupe Hidalgo. When a fight erupts over a school dance, Tiger’s last words to June are cruel. She doesn’t know they will be the last.
After: The Descent
Hours later, mid–first kiss with Kai, Tiger learns June has died of a brain aneurysm. Overnight she becomes a ward of the state and is absorbed into the foster care system: first an emergency placement, then a steadier home with LaLa, where she meets kids who understand survival, including the blunt, watchful Thaddeus Roach. A voicemail cracks open Tiger’s past: she has a father, Dustin "Dusty" Franklin, in prison, and—more shocking—a twenty-year-old half-sister, Shayna Lee Franklin, who steps forward to be her guardian.
Friction, Flight, and the Breaking Point
Life with Shayna is messy and volatile. Tiger flails beneath grief and the ache of regret, while Shayna battles her own trauma and self-destructive patterns. School explodes into a fight and suspension; Tiger is ordered to attend a grief group, where unlikely allies emerge, including former nemesis Lupe and the quiet, observant Mae-Lynn Carpenter. When Shayna’s abusive boyfriend, Ray, tracks her down, violence erupts. Tiger runs, calls 911, makes a reckless choice behind the wheel of the “Jellymobile,” and lands in juvenile detention.
Rebuilding and Hope
Shayna presses charges, commits to sobriety, and wins Tiger’s release into her custody. For the first time, they speak honestly—about fear, responsibility, and the terrifying work of becoming a family. Tiger discovers a final video from June that reveals the scars of June’s own childhood and the roots of her overprotectiveness, giving Tiger a crucial measure of peace. The novel closes with the sisters preparing to move and start over—still grieving, but choosing to carry each other forward.
For a fuller scene-by-scene outline, see the Full Book Summary.
Central Characters
A cast of wounded, resilient teens and adults—the living proof of how people hold one another up—anchors the story. For more names and nuance, visit the Character Overview.
Tiger Tolliver
Grief strips Tiger to the bone. She lashes out, steals a car, drinks, and makes bad choices that are, at heart, the choices of someone drowning. Her growth isn’t neat or redemptive so much as honest: she learns to coexist with loss, to claim her voice, and to build fragile, real connections that can survive the weight of absence.
Shayna Lee Franklin
Initially a chaotic, party-first twenty-year-old, Shayna evolves into a young woman willing to do the hard, unglamorous labor of guardianship and recovery. Her arc mirrors Tiger’s: both must face histories of neglect and violence, set boundaries, and redefine what family means. Choosing Tiger is Shayna’s first act of radical responsibility—and love.
June Tolliver
June’s fierce love and anxious protectiveness shape every corner of Tiger’s life. Even in death, her story continues through the video message that reframes her fear as the legacy of her own trauma. June’s complexity—as both a shelter and a barrier—haunts and ultimately heals Tiger.
Supporting Cast
- Cake Rishworth: Steady, loyal, and a lifeline to Tiger’s “Before,” Cake embodies the stubborn grace of Friendship.
- Kai Henderson: A first kiss and a gentle presence, symbolizing the normalcy Tiger craves.
- Lupe Hidalgo: Former bully turned grief-group ally; their wary truce becomes real solidarity.
- Thaddeus Roach: A survivor who reads the system clearly and offers Tiger blunt compassion.
- Mae-Lynn Carpenter: Quiet, steadfast grief-group member who validates Tiger’s pain without demanding performance.
- Dustin "Dusty" Franklin: An absent father whose incarceration shadows Tiger’s search for origin and identity.
Major Themes
For expanded discussions and related motifs, see the Theme Overview.
Grief and Loss
Glasgow refuses tidy stages of mourning; grief here is tidal, sensory, and sometimes terrifying. By tracking hours, days, and weeks, the book measures not progress but endurance—how the body and mind survive the unthinkable.
Family and Found Family
The novel contrasts blood ties (June, Dusty, Shayna) with communities built in crisis: foster homes, grief groups, old friends who keep showing up. It argues that family is less a lineage than a practice—one made in rides, calls, boundaries, apologies, and second chances.
Identity and Coming of Age
When the role of “June’s daughter” vanishes, Tiger must name herself anew. Her passage into adulthood is accelerated and unsentimental, forged through hard choices, accountability, and the understanding that identity can include sorrow without being defined by it.
Resilience and Survival
Survival isn’t framed as triumph but as a daily discipline: tell the truth, ask for help, keep going. Small defiances—forming a band, calling 911, pressing charges, choosing sobriety—accumulate into a life that can hold both pain and possibility.
Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms
The book treats panic, PTSD, and suicidal ideation with clarity and care, showing both the harm of numbing behaviors and the relief of community and routine. Grief group scenes model how being witnessed can shift the weight of sorrow.
Guilt and Forgiveness
Tiger’s last words to June become a thorn she can’t stop touching. The story reframes forgiveness—not as forgetting or absolution—but as a way to keep loving, including loving the self that was suffering and didn’t know better.
Literary Significance
How to Make Friends with the Dark stands out in contemporary YA for its unvarnished honesty and lyrical, bodily writing. Glasgow validates messy emotions and rejects “healed” endings; survival itself becomes the book’s radical hope. “I walk around like my skin’s been removed, cooked, and put back on me,” Tiger says, a line that encapsulates the novel’s raw physicality of grief. Its influence lies in how it marries compassion with truth-telling, giving readers a language for pain and a map for staying. For more striking lines, see the Quotes page.
Historical Context
Set against the realities of the American child welfare apparatus, the novel humanizes statistics about displacement, incarceration, and trauma. Through Tiger’s journey, it exposes the gaps—and the unexpected kindnesses—within systems meant to protect children, underscoring the urgent need for accessible mental health care and sustained community support.
Critical Reception
Critics and fellow YA authors praised the novel’s emotional precision and empathy. Jennifer Niven called it “breathtaking and heartbreaking,” Karen M. McManus lauded its rare power and honesty, and Julie Buxbaum highlighted Glasgow’s “unflinching beauty.” The consensus: a difficult, necessary read that finds light without denying the dark.