Kathleen Glasgow’s How to Make Friends with the Dark maps the jagged terrain of grief with startling intimacy. Through sixteen-year-old Tiger Tolliver, the novel tracks how sudden loss fractures identity, upends ideas of family, and demands new ways of surviving. As Tiger navigates the foster system and uncovers hidden family history, the book insists that learning to live with sorrow—not outrun it—is its own coming-of-age.
Major Themes
Grief and Loss
Bold, nonlinear, and bodily, grief floods every corner of Tiger’s life, cleaving it into “Before” and “After” the death of her mother, June Tolliver. Glasgow renders mourning as disorientation—numbness, rage, guilt, and dissociation—while the novel’s “dark” becomes a companion she must learn to live beside rather than defeat. Symbols like the lace dress and the book’s title track the shift from self-punishment to fragile coexistence with loss.
Family and Found Family
The story dismantles and rebuilds what “family” can mean, tracing Tiger’s passage from a tight, codependent duo with June to a patchwork of biological and chosen bonds. Foster placements expose the limits and kindnesses of institutional care, while encounters with her father, Dustin "Dusty" Franklin, and half-sister, Shayna Lee Franklin complicate blood ties. Alongside this, friendships and grief-circle connections model families forged by understanding and need rather than legality or DNA.
Identity and Coming of Age
Tiger’s identity, once fused with June’s routines and rules, must be remade under pressure. Her struggle is less about teen rebellion than survival: naming herself, setting boundaries, and deciding who she is when the defining relationship of her life is gone. Mirrors, her nickname “Tiger,” and the discovery of her paternal lineage push her from “June’s daughter” toward a self that can carry grief without being consumed by it.
Supporting Themes
The Foster Care System and Child Welfare
The novel’s ground-level view of placements, paperwork, and “case” language exposes a system that keeps kids alive yet often strips them of agency and continuity. Tiger’s moves—from emergency care to group homes—accelerate her coming of age even as they erode stability, forcing her to seek found family where policy falls short.
Resilience and Survival
Survival here means learning to carry grief, not outrun it. Tiger, Thaddeus Roach), and peers in the grief group endure in imperfect, halting ways that honor the human capacity to adapt, rebuild, and keep choosing life amid pain.
Friendship
When family collapses, friendship becomes shelter. Cake Rishworth steadies Tiger with practical care and loyalty, while the grief circle transforms shared loss into radical honesty—friendship as a structure that makes it possible to tell the truth and keep going.
Guilt and Forgiveness
Tiger’s self-blame over her last fight with June curdles into penance—the lace dress, lashing out, isolation. The path forward requires forgiving the self she was in that impossible moment, as well as untangling anger toward absent parents and buried family secrets.
Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms
Grief brushes against depression, substance use, and suicidal ideation; the book refuses to tidy these edges. Coping ranges from numbing behaviors to the structured, communal processing of the grief group, suggesting that naming pain aloud within community can reroute despair.
Theme Interactions
- Grief and Loss → Family and Found Family: Bereavement detonates Tiger’s original family and drives her toward Shayna, Cake, and the grief circle; the same grief that isolates her also becomes the bridge to new bonds.
- Identity and Coming of Age ↔ The Foster Care System and Child Welfare: Systemic labels reduce Tiger to a “case,” pushing her to claim a self beyond paperwork—adolescence fast-tracked by bureaucracy.
- Guilt and Forgiveness → Resilience and Survival: Self-forgiveness loosens grief’s chokehold, making endurance possible; resilience blooms as guilt gives way to acceptance.
- Friendship → Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms: Friends function as crisis buffers and meaning-makers—Cake’s practical care keeps Tiger afloat, while group sharing reframes private anguish.
- Family and Found Family ↔ Identity and Coming of Age: As Tiger and Shayna test a sibling bond, Tiger revises who she is and what she owes to blood, history, and choice.
- Grief and Loss → Mental Health and Coping Mechanisms: Proximity to the “dark” necessitates tools; therapy-like spaces and honest language become lifelines rather than cures.
Character Embodiment
Tiger Tolliver Tiger is the novel’s lens on grief, identity, and survival. Her trajectory—from stunned dissociation to raw anger to tentative integration—models how selfhood can be rebuilt around an unfillable absence.
June Tolliver June’s fierce love and secrets anchor the family-and-identity knot the book must untie. In death, she becomes both wound and compass, shaping Tiger’s guilt, longing, and eventual acceptance.
Shayna Lee Franklin Shayna embodies the messy promise of found-and-blood family: a stranger who becomes sister. Through her, Tiger confronts inheritance, expands her definition of home, and practices mutual caretaking.
Cake Rishworth Cake enacts friendship as refuge—food, a bed, a place to be known without performance. She steadies Tiger’s mental health and proves that chosen kin can be as binding as blood.
Dustin "Dusty" Franklin Dusty embodies the fraught past Tiger didn’t know she carried. His absence and history complicate identity, stir anger, and test Tiger’s capacity for understanding and forgiveness.
Mae-Lynn Carpenter, Taran, Alif, and Lupe Hidalgo The grief group gives grief a vocabulary and a community. Their varied losses show sorrow’s universality and the healing leverage of shared testimony.
Thaddeus Roach Thaddeus foregrounds survival and coping in the wake of abuse and chronic pain, mirroring Tiger’s struggle and widening the book’s portrait of endurance.
LaLa and Georgia; Karen Adults inside the system—imperfect, compassionate, constrained—illustrate how institutional care can wound and shelter at once, shaping Tiger’s search for a steadier home.
Kai Henderson and Ellen Untermeyer Catalysts in Tiger’s emotional weather: Kai marks early bids for independence, while the incident with Ellen exposes grief’s volatility and the cost of unprocessed rage.