This was, in many ways, an excellent book. In other ways, I found myself struggling through it. Struggling perhaps because it’s told from a 16-year-old girl’s point of view, which is rather immature. I’m really not sure. Maybe is was just the subject matter…

In places the book felt like it lagged. Grace has an obsession with TIME. She kept saying things like, “It’s been 64,594 seconds since my mother died.” After a while that started to annoy me.

As someone who has lost two young children and two husbands, I have an intimate understanding of grief; a unique perspective of it. Experiencing it four times puts one in a club nobody wants to belong to. This book is very accurate about the many ways grief sneaks up on you, even LONG after you’ve lost someone you love dearly — how a sight, sound, smell (smells are very powerful triggers) or a memory can set one off. They can cause one to say, do and act in ways one would not normally act.

In this way, I related completely to Grace. Throughout the book, I found myself wondering, “How on earth does a 16-year-old, with no real life experience to draw from, and no relatives to rely on, make sense of losing the ONLY person she has in her life? Her MOTHER?” My mother and I were always like oil and water. My grandparents raised me. I was so very close to my grandmother. There are certain smells, even after all these years, that can stop me in my tracks and make me cry (Jergen’s Original Almond & Cherry Hand Lotion can reduce me to a puddle of water every time). I could FEEL Grace’s pain when she was sitting in the hospital, WILLING her mother to wake up, to be be alive and be her mother again. The author did a superb job painting pictures throughout the book to make readers understand the depth of Grace’s pain and of feeling lost. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose your only parent at the tender age of 16, having no other relative to go to, being pulled from the only home you’ve ever lived in and then being thrust into the scary world of foster care — through no fault of your own; so full of grief already and now having no familiar home of your own and no idea of where you are even going to sleep that night. Grace had no power, no control and no voice in anything that was happening to her. One morning she went off to school just like she always did. That afternoon it was like she had fallen down a rabbit hole and woken up in Alice’s seat in Wonderland.

Then Grace’s world is rocked again when she finds out she has a dad in prison she never knew about as well as a half sister, only 20-years-old who is now to be her guardian. In a lot of ways, Grace is more mature and more capable than the sister. I found myself holding my breath, praying this young woman was not going to let Grace down and disillusion and hurt her even further. The sister is young, brassy, mouthy and didn’t seem the least bit happy about being there for Grace.

For the most part, I found this book depressing, but given the subject material, how could it be otherwise? The book was also thought provoking, spot-on and insightful.

Halfway through the book I debated whether I would finish it or not. Three-quarters of the way through, I found I couldn’t NOT finish…I HAD to know what happened to Grace and whether she came to a place in her life where she could begin putting the building blocks of a new life in place for herself. I found the ending to be rather satisfying.

But, I would like to know WHY someone someone didn’t force Grace to take that awful, stinky, ugly dress off and BURN it?!😳