How to Tend a Grave

by Jocelyn Shipley

When Liam’s mom is killed, he thinks life can’t get any worse. He’s wrong. He’s forced to live with a grandfather he’s never known, in a small town where kids called Youth and Crime lead the local gang. They’re posers, but they mean trouble, and their favourite hangout is the cemetery where Liam’s mom is buried. But the cemetery is also where Liam meets Harmony, a gorgeous but unusual girl who records the names of all the babies buried there long ago. Besides their grief, both Liam and Harmony have secrets.

The very different stories of these two fifteen-year-olds interweave brilliantly in this fast-paced, engaging and unforgettable novel about family, love and healing.

Genres: Romance, Young Adult, Canada

184 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2012

About the author

Born and raised in London, Ontario, Jocelyn graduated from York University and has studied writing at St. Lawrence College and the Humber School for Writers. She always wanted to be a writer, and won her first award at age nine, for poems entered in the local Hobby Fair.


Jocelyn now lives in Toronto and on Vancouver Island. Her YA novel,How to Tend a Grave, won the 2012 Gold Medal Moonbeam Award for YA Fiction - Mature Issues.

Reviews

[Joanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having just finished this amazingly heart-wrenching and tragic, yet hopeful story of two teens dealing with grief, I want to turn around and read it again. Told in the alternating points of views of Liam, a boy suffering from the loss of his mother, and the grief-journal written by Harmony, a young teen dealing with a great loss of her own, this story made me gasp out loud and moved me to tears several times. This is a gritty story of troubled teens, particularly Liam who, after his mom dies, learns some pretty hard truths about her and her life choices. More than a coming-of-age story, HOW TO TEND A GRAVE is a book about growing up amid the tough stuff that real life can throw at you. Liam and Harmony are beautifully drawn, flawed and complex characters who both definitely won my heart in a big way.

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[Laina SpareTime]

2020 note: Review originally posted in 2014. May contain statements I no longer agree with.

How to Tend a Grave is told through the alternating POVs of Liam and Harmony. Liam loses his mom at the beginning of the book and, through Harmony's diary entries, we learn that she has recently had a late-term miscarriage. The book deals largely with the process of them both grieving. I kind of have a lot of mixed feelings about it. I liked a lot of it, but I also had some issues with it. I thought that the Harmony parts, being that they were in first person, were much stronger than Liam's third person parts. His parts tended to be kind of rushed with not enough time to really get into his characterization or motivation. In fact, the whole book could have done with expanding a lot of scenes. This easily could have been a 300 page book and it would have been a lot better, I think. Read the rest on my blog.

[Nicole Winters · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story has a lot going on under the surface, so don't be fooled by the ease of the prose. Without giving away the plot, these characters constantly struggle with who they are and the choices they make in an ever changing, sometimes unstable world. I read this book five months ago and yet the book continues to resonate with me. I'm baffled as to why Shipley is not more widely known.

[Wendy J. Whittingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOW TO TEND A GRAVE by Jocelyn Shipley is the riveting story of a teen boy (Liam) whose mother's death causes a dramatic change in his life. I could NOT put this one down!