How to Make Friends with the Dark

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Thaddeus came out of nowhere and became her friend in a very short period of time, which felt rushed and unrealistic to me, though I appreciated that he didn't just become a love interest as these characters tend to.

The themes of grief, anger and isolation are tackled so sensitivity and the characters feel so real that you end up hurting for them. Kathleen Glasgow is the rare type of skilled storyteller that knows you have to hurt your characters before putting them back together.In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. From page one, Tiger Tolliver grabs your heart with her pain, her courage, her humor—and she doesn't let go. Not only were we dealing with the tragic, unexpected death of a family member, we then had to deal with a homicide trial and far too much publicity.

Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like[s] him. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.These elements, which are not sufficiently addressed, combined with the use of ableist language, cannot be erased by any amount of romantic banter. This could just be a problem with the ARC, but the technical things in the writing were really weird. In Kathryn Glasgow's How to Make Friends with the Dark, 16-year-old Tiger learns that her mother is dead, and almost equally upsetting, she can't even go somewhere familiar to stay while she figures out how to adjust to being an orphan; with no known father or other relatives, she is relegated to the legal responsibility of the state of Arizona and uprooted from the life and the people she knew.