Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and analyzes the source text’s depiction of grief and trauma, controlling behavior, domestic violence that results in death, and mental illness.

The novel explores the difficulty of Coping with Grief and Trauma via Maggie Carlton’s and West Ashby’s experiences with loss. Glines addresses the nuanced experiences of both characters, depicting a range of reactionary feelings and coping skills. Both Maggie and West lose a family member, and these plotlines play an important role in the young adult genre, partly because of teenagers’ proximity to family and the likelihood of familial complications and trauma in a young person’s life. While depictions of family life in stories are often positive, Glines doesn’t shy away from the traumatic reality some young people endure during their formative years.

Maggie’s form of coping is through silence, and throughout the novel, she begins to expand the range of people in her life she is willing to openly communicate with. Maggie watches her father kill her mother two years prior to the narrative present. Although time has passed since the tragedy, Maggie has remained silent ever since. “Keeping quiet is how [she’s] survived,” because there has been “no one to understand” what she went through (75).