Comment on theme

Grief and Abandonment is a major theme in the novel as the author gives her reader a look at the process of grief resulting either from abandonment by death or physical separation from a variety of different standpoints. Alice tells her story from the point of view of a daughter who has lost her mother as well as a mother who has lost her children. Jenna also struggles with her sense of grief and abandonment as she believes first her mother abandoned her and then that her father killed her mother. Even Serenity struggles with abandonment as she loses two friends to whom she had grown very close. Also discussed in the novel is the way different characters deal with their grief.