Kathleen Glasgow knows how to create such layered, complex characters, especially those who are struggling with deep pain. I was drawn Tiger on the first page and so invested in her journey and how she was going to survive without her mother. I ordered a copy for myself and will be suggesting this title to my students, especially during the creative writing summer camp I'm teaching.

How to make friends with the dark is a book about grief. It's a book about what it means to be left alone. It's about a girl named Grace (although she prefers to be called Tiger) and a giant hole inside her. This book will tell you how she became a friend with the dark.
It's really hard to talk about this book. Not just because of spoilers, but because this book broke my heart. On multiple occasions I had to put this book down because it would make my cry, and I just couldn't go on. It's really hard to imagine what it feels like to be left alone in this world. That feeling, to be without a mother... That feeling creeped into me while I was reading this book. It's really important to have this kind of books. Books that deal with grief, books that shows young people that it's okay to feel sad and that they are not alone. This book made me cry, it made my heart ache and it left me heartbroken. But it also gave me hope, hope that sometimes, everything turns out how it's supposed to be. Sometimes, you learn to make friends with the dark.
If you love books that have strong friendship, sisters that care about each other and amazing parent figures, than this is the book for you. In this book you will find well developed characters, amazing writing style and one and unforgettable Tiger, how will get under your skin forever. This book will break you, it will make you cry, but at the end, your heart will be filled with the hope that maybe someday every Tiger on this world will find Shayna. That every Tiger in this world will be loved and cared for. That they will not have to make friends with the dark.

I knew this would be an emotional read because I have read the first title by this author, Girl in Pieces. Though it was tough topic to read about, I think it is an important book to have available to teens. It deals with many things our teens do on a daily basis: grief, death, foster care, depression, suicidal thoughts. I will be purchasing this book for my high school library and I will be recommending it to my teens; even if they aren't dealing with kind of issue, it is important to develop empathy and understand what others are going through. The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is because I feel like it could have been shorter, which would be more appealing to more of my students.

This book is very relatable to anyone who has ever experienced grief. The use of switching from first to second person temporarily in moments of heightened emotions is particularly useful in understanding what the character is really going through. The increasing action keeps readers engaged. It was great to see a list of services related to grief and loss included in the end of the book. 
#IndigoEmployee

From the very beginning of this book, tears streamed down my face, uncontrollably. No matter where I was; at my house, at work or our in the world, I couldn’t put this book down or stop crying. Kathleen Glasgow has brought to life the feeling of loss in such a gripping, realistic way that it only makes sense that she has felt this kind of loss in her own personal life.  This story starts with Before. Before Tiger loses her mother, June. You are there with her before, during and after this crushing loss. We then follow Tiger as she is moved between foster homes and we experience the good and bad characters that Tiger comes into contact with. Tiger may have just lost her mom, but through a very dark road, she finds new people to call family. This book really opened by eyes to foster care and adoption. I had no idea how it all worked and how sad it is. To lose your family and be thrust into this chaotic ecosystem where you have no freedom is absolutely shocking. If you are struggling with loss, mental health or anything else. YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Although I cried a lot, I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend everyone check it out. The cover is gorgeous, the story is addicting and you won’t be able to put it down. Thank you NetGalley for gifting me this book.

Grief is extremely personal. No two people experience and process their grief in the same way. Kathleen Glasgow's novel How to Make Friends with the Dark beautifully explores the complexity, the isolation, the raw pain you feel when someone you love dies.

What's it about?
Tiger's mother may be overprotective, but it has always been Tiger and her mother against the world. 

On a day like any other, after harsh words you can't take back are exchanged, Tiger's mother unexpectedly dies. And now Tiger is alone.

The raw, gaping hole in her heart is all that remains and Tiger has to learn how to make friends with the dark.

My Thoughts
I read Katheleen Glasgow's debut Girl in Pieces 2 years ago and I was blown away. That book was a ROLLER COASTER. My expectations for How to Make Friends with the Dark were high. And was I let down?

No, no I was not.

How to Make Friends with the Dark takes you on a wild ride from a normal school day with the hopes of kissing your crush to literally the worst moment for anyone to go through: identifying your mother's body in a morgue. From there you're whisked away and shoved into the foster system, placed in the charge of a harsh caregiver who locks and inventories their food to a lovable hippy who is really doing the best they can with a girl ripped apart from the inside out, and finally placed under the care of a long lost sister barely older than Tiger. 

You spend a lot of time stuck in Tiger's mind and her thoughts, for the first part of the book, can be quite cyclical and repetitive and a bit like "get on with it." I also can suffer from repetitive thoughts, but that doesn't mean I didn't find it frustrating at times and all I could think was "let's get a move on." (Don't tell someone grieving to just get over it… You might get slapped in the mouth.) But "move on" it does.

What I Liked
	• Strong Female Friendships. Cake and Tiger (literally some of craziest names I've ever encountered in contemporary fiction) have such a solid friendship. It's beautiful. When it would have been easy for Tiger to push Cake away or for Cake to disappear when things get hard and Tiger's emotions are messy, their friendship weathers the storm. Cake is always there for Tiger, almost to the detriment of herself. 
	• Realistic Portrayals of Teenagers. In the beginning, I related to Tiger so much. She is one of the most realistic portrayals of a teen girl I have ever read. I was getting flashbacks to how I felt in high school, looking around me at all the girls that seemed so mature while I felt like a lump of misshapen dough. 
	• Realistic Portrayal of Grief. Tiger's grief is almost palpable at times and at other times its can be frustrating. You just want to shake her and yell "Snap out of it!" She acts out. She wears the same dress she fought with her mom about for WEEKS on end. She gets angry. She fights. Her thoughts get very dark. 
	• No Romance. Yes, you read that right! No romance. In a genre that easily falls into the trap of "love fixes all", this book is not one of them. 
	• Shayna. Literally my favorite character. She's smart, strong, funny, and compassionate. She has little self awareness at times and can be quite rude. But she's real. She pushes Tiger when no one else around her is willing to push her. She is not necessarily someone I would like in real life, she is a bit off putting at times, but in this story, I loved her. 
	• The notion that you are not alone no matter how isolated in your grief you feel. For the better part of the book, Tiger feels alone in her grief. She feels like an island floating out to sea in darkness she alone can feel surrounded by smiling happy faces. But she eventually realizes, she is not alone. She isn't the only to lose a loved one let alone lose a parent. 
        • Jellymobile. I don't like jelly, but I can get on board with a jellymobile. I am only human after all.

What I Didn't Like
	• Pacing. A lot happens in this books. Just like in Kathleen Glasgow's other novel Girl in Pieces, it starts slow and then goes sideways fast. It’s the same complaint I had with that book that I have with this one. Almost nothing happens for the first 150 - 200 pages and then EVERYTHING happens in the last 200 pages. Those last 200 pages are gripping, but I just feel this book would have benefited from reducing the cyclical thoughts and spreading out the action over more pages. A lot of stuff happens and its important and I think delving into it more and exploring the consequences of people's choices would have turned this into a 5 star read for me. 

Grief is complicated and deserves to be explored in an honest and open way. This book manages that without being preachy or filling itself with meaningless like platitudes. Kathleen Glasgow is unflinching in the face of pain and we could all stand to learn how to make friends with the dark. 

Trigger Warnings: abuse, alcoholism, suicidal thoughts, suicide

Thank you to Netgalley, Delacorte Press, and Children's Random House for supplying me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are my own and a have not been influence by the publisher or the author.

I received this e-arc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

I seriously just finished this book and I'm having a hard time to put all my thoughts into words. How to Make Friends with the Dark is a book about deep, deep grief that needs to be read. I knew going into this book that it was going to be sad and I would most likely cry, but what I didn't know, was how it was going to leave such an impression on my heart. 

We follow Grace "Tiger" Tolliver, a 16-year-old girl who only has her mother and a handful of friends. She lives a somewhat normal teenage life. She deals with crap at school with bullies but has the coolest best friend. All she wants to do is kiss the boy she likes and who she thinks likes her back.  She has a super overprotective mother who hardly lets her do anything, but her mother is all she has, so she is fine with it. She doesn't have a lot of food, and gets all of her clothes from thrift stores, but is okay with that, because she has her mom. But what happens when her fun-loving mom is taken away from her by death? Unspeakable grief. 

We now follow Tiger through her grief. Having to figure out who she is going to live with. Staying with complete strangers. And trying to figure out who the heck she is without her mom. It was a hard book to get through at times. In the head of someone who has so much grief, it is overwhelming her. But I really loved Tiger. She is a super strong character, even throughout all that has happened.

I felt like this book was so eye-opening to a world I don 't know personally. Kathleen Glasglow definitely has a with words. She makes you fall in love with all these amazing characters and feel exactly how they feel.

I will say that although this book had a lot of sad parts, there are hopeful parts as well. I recommend this book to everyone, especially those who are dealing with grief. Also, I recommend you read the Author Notes, they are super good.  

Thank you, Kathleen, for writing this amazing, heart-wrenching, story for us!

I am honestly so conflicted about this book. I wanted to like it, I really did, and sometimes I did actually like it, but the writing and execution for me were the biggest issues. It was funny sometimes, but also just so strange. I can't really say what I didn't like about it, I just didn't like it.

I had a very hard time connecting with Tiger, the main character. She was very abrasive and I felt strange because I had to remind myself that I should feel bad for her. I've never suffered this specific kind of loss, but I have overcome death-induced depression after the suicide of my friend in high school, so while I could connect with the sentiments on a base level, they didn't inspire any real emotion in me. I'm the kind of person who emotionally connects to literally everything in a book, especially of this genre, so that was a very strange thing for me.

I found many of the other characters felt unrealistic, especially in their dialogue. Sometimes things were said that didn't feel like something any living, breathing human being would say, instead of a book character. 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 introduction of Lupe Hidalgo was probably the first thing in this that I genuinely didn't like, because she felt extremely cliche and unrealistic, especially with the other high schooler's reaction to her. She felt too blatantly rude, like a Disney Channel mean girl, and not an actual school bully.

I liked Shayna but felt that some of her plot twists could have been done better. There was a lot of weird pacing in this, which I guess reflects real life, but it made for a whiplashy reading experience. There were several times when Tiger just didn't address certain things that seemed like pretty pressing issues, which honestly contributed to my general dislike of her.

The various odd nicknames were jarring, as I've literally never met a single person in my entire life who honestly went by Cake or Crash or something like that. Maybe I've just lived in too many normal places, but that sounds like a cartoon character to me, not a real person.

This could just be a problem with the ARC, but the technical things in the writing were really weird. Like, it felt like this wasn't edited at all. I had such a hard time figuring out who the speaker was sometimes, because dialogue would continue into the next paragraph, but the new speaker rule was followed, even though the speaker was often the same. Like, all the author had to do was remove that extra quotation mark at the end of the first paragraph. It's literally that simple.

Overall, I thought it was fine, even really good at times, but because of the writing, I just really couldn't get into it. You might love it, it might even be your favorite book, but it just wasn't for me.

I am absolutely mind blown at how amazing this novel was. From the very first sentence I was ready to not stop and to see where kathleen was going to take us on this journey. I will say, if you need a trigger warning please be warned about sexual abuse and suicide. Those topics were discussed but, it wasn’t as overpowering as I was expecting it to be due to me getting out of a domestic violence situation recently. The storyline was very captivating and I felt apart of the book the entire way through. It was very well written and I will continue to read anything she writes.

How to Make Friends with the Dark was an emotional rollercoaster that I couldn't help but become obsessed with. Kathleen Glasgow's writing is so complex and beautiful, I can't get enough of it! I'm always intrigued to see what she writes next, especially after this show-stopper!

This book was absolutely beautifully written, but also heart wrenching to read.  Glasgow did an amazing job about writing on a subject that is one of the harder things to endure, losing a parent, and she did so in a way that raw emotion flooded through me.  I will be recommending to anyone that loved the ya genre on topics that are not all sunshine and rays.  
Will be using in a challenge and letting the members of Chapter Chatter Pub know about how beautiful and heartbreaking of a read it is.

Right after having her first kiss Grace “Tiger” Tolliver learns that her mother has died from a brain hemorrhage. Now an orphan, Tiger is now a “ward of the state” and is now in foster care. Tiger must now grapple with her grief and the realization that things would never be okay again. This is one sad book. After her mother dies Tiger is immediately put into the foster care system where she sees how bad things could get for foster kids. While Grace is there because her only known parent has died, some foster kids she meets have living parents who are unable to care for them. While there are a few light moments, things do get gloomy. Readers get to feel Tiger's grief which hits her very hard. Glasgow has Tiger pass through different foster homes of varying quality filled with kids who are there under different circumstances. She doesn't flinch away from some of the failures of the system. While the book ends on an optimistic note I would not recommend this book for readers who are looking for a light read.

I'm sure I'm in the minority on this one, but I found Tiger's story so, so heavy-handed. Ms. Glasgow has proven she can write about extremely difficult emotional issues and relationships, but How to Make Friends with the Dark is so obvious in its You. Will. Feel!ness that I felt like I was being told what to feel instead of being allowed to actually feel it. And that's a problem when writing a book that's as intense as this wants to be--in order to be an intense and compelling read, it actually has to be one. Trying to corral a reader into feeling something is clumsy and ends up with the predominant feeling being annoyance (at least for this reader). 

The cover is, hands down, one of the best ya covers of 2019 (heck, of all 2019 covers--it's that good!) and I think that some teens will enjoy this. But for me, the real sadness of How to Make Friends with the Dark is that it spends so much time trying to hit emotional beats that it forgets to fully deliver on real emotion.

TW: Death, grief, sadness

I'm so glad I read this. 

It's a heartbreakingly beautiful novel about grief, love, loss, and acceptance. 

It's hard for me to compose a review because I was hit so hard by Kathleen Glasgow's raw, emotional writing.

All I want you to take from this "review" (I can't really call it that, can I) is this: YOU NEED THIS BOOK IN YOUR LIFE RIGHT NOW!!

This book made me cry... a lot. But it also made me think and consider the hardships that other people go through, particularly in a community of people that is often overlooked and not spoken about. Truly enjoyed this read and am excited to recommend it to others.

This book is absolutely beautiful! I loved it! It was heartwarming and heartbreaking both at the same time. This is one of those reads that will stay with me forever. I would highly recommend this!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own

Many thanks to the publisher and EdelweissPlus for providing me with an eARC of this title for review. All opinions are my own.

When I was describing this book to a friend who also reads a bunch, I said it was so good, but also soul-numblingly sad. I loved it, but it was HARD to read. Tiger's mom dies, which would be sad enough on its own, but Tiger has to deal with her last words to her mother (why don't you just leave me alone?) foster care (she has a non-existent and out of the picture dad), an unknown half-sister (what 20 year old can care for a 16 year old?) in the midst of a grief so large Tiger can't imagine ever finding her way out of it. 

This was an amazing book. Fans of Glasgow's earlier work <i>Girl in Pieces </i> won't be disappointed, and to be honest, I enjoyed this one even more than that one. This one had a reality to it that felt almost raw. It was a situation that seems like it could be a moment or a chance away from all of us, which is scary and haunting. 

Recommended for readers grades 8 and up due to some language and the maturity of the feelings portrayed, along with foster care realities. First purchase for libraries where realistic fiction is in demand.

Kathleen Glascow's book is one of the best YA books I've read this year (and I've already read plenty.) I am astonished at the way she used language and plotting, masterfully low-key and high-emotional. This book is in the genre of emotional YA books, but it isn't frivolous with emotionalism or trite in the way readers are pulled into the story. I highly recommend this one for all readers for its literary qualities. Terribly well-done and wonderfully hard to read at parts. 

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Title: How to Make Friends with the Dark
Author: Kathleen Glasgow
Genre: YA Contemporary Fiction
Publication Date: April 9th, 2019
Rating: 3.5 stars
Contains (Warning): Suicide, Domestic Abuse, Parental Death, Language

eARC provided by publisher (Delacorte Press) through NetGalley

->Click for Synopsis<-

Tiger Tolliver is like any other teen. She is worrying about boys and dances but when she gets a phone call about her mother, everything changes. She must now learn how to live without her mother and figure out how to deal with the darkness that is creeping in.

I wasn't sure what to expect when diving into this book. I was drawn in by the cover and the synopsis made it sound quite intriguing. In some ways this book lived up to my expectations and in other ways it lacked a bit for me.

Tiger Tolliver is a typical teen until the death of her mother starts a domino effect of events. She doesn't know how to even begin to cope with her mother's death and having to deal with arranging the funeral, foster homes, and living relatives brings more stress and adds to the blackhole of emotions she already has.

This book is filled with tough subjects like the ones mentioned above and I am not sure how anyone manages to pull themself out of those circumstances. Tiger brings new light to issues that some children and teens face. It is quite heartbreaking.

The writing style was hard to get into and some of the little extra things, like the hashtags, just didn't seem necessary to me. There was some language which also is a turn off for me but I can understand why it was used since the book is about a teen.

The plot was filled with many dramatic details and at times it felt overwhelming. Some of the minor characters were present and then gone. I was hoping Thaddeus would be mentioned in the epilogue part but sadly he wasn't. I did like how they added an epilogue but it just wasn't as conclusive as I wanted it to be.

Overall, it was still a read that I will remember even if I may have not been a fan of everything. Tiger is a heartbreaking character and sheds light on many hard topics that other teens may face in their life.

I’m going to be the black sheep of this book I guess, but it was NOT for me. The storyline was insanely slow, I had zero connection with it, and it really just felt like nothing happened. 

I normally like books that have a deep, emotional storyline; but this one didn’t hit the mark for me. I couldn’t FEEL the emotion at all. With what this book is based on I honestly expected to be a mess while reading it, and I just wasn’t. I was overall very disconnected and disappointed.