How To Make Friends With The Dark: Wave and waves...and waves of grief

How would you feel if your mum suddenly died. Today. Right this minute, of a brain aneurysm? You'd think it was an awful, universe-gone-mad-mistake.

This is how 16-year-old Tiger Tolliver describes losing her mum in these exact circumstances.

Her mum dies alone, on their sofa in their shabby home. As her brain explodes and her lights go out, Tiger is at a skate park, kissing her crush.

The moments around her mother's death haunt Tiger endlessly. Kathleen Glasgow, an author well known for her novel Girl in Pieces, shows grief in it's irrational, raw, passionate and heartbreaking form.

This isn't a coming of age story about a motherless orphan (also without a father) who prevails above all and becomes a Nobel Prize winner or bestselling poet. This is a coming of age story about a teenage foster girl who wears the same clothes every day, who can hardly move, who cannot fathom a world where she is parent-less and can never forgive herself for the last words she said to her over-protective mother.

It's a book that makes you realise, no matter how much you want to break free from your mother's grips, how much you want to stay out late, meet boys and drink alcohol despite her protests - you'll give anything to get it back if those rules and regulations suddenly went away. Where would your direction in life be? Who will look after you? Who will love you unconditionally?

Who can ever replace your mum?

Not only this, you'll realise how ignorant and naive you probably were as a teenager. You forget that when you left school and went home, your home wasn't the same as everyone else's. You don't even begin to think about what other kids are going home too, especially when you all seem like the same packed and graded sardines at school. Now I'm older (and hopefully wiser) I see that of course, class and income meant that everyone lived wildly different lives during their teen years. While some went back to middle-class households where food was always on the table and luxury gifts were opened at Christmas, other kids were struggling alongside a single parent, or feeling lost in a foster home. Hungry, afraid or abused. Tiger is forced to learn through her changing circumstances, that even kids who hide in plain sight are living lives she never gave a second thought.

Despite what she learns, there is of course nothing that can take away the pain of losing her mum, but beautifully, Kathleen doesn't deny that. It isn't a book that will make you feel fluffy and giddy about overcoming grief. It's an honest book about how one can continue to live when death engulfs them. Every word was dripped in agony but honesty.

Although the novel ends rather abruptly and a little too quickly, there is ultimately hope lingering for Tiger. There is belief that her life will improve - not because she will ever get over her mother's death, but simply because she will learn to make friends with the dark.