LaCour deals explicitly with grief and loss throughout this novel. In the Acknowledgements section, she writes that the idea for this book came to her in the months after her own grandfather’s death, when she was grieving him. The reader enters Marin’s grief at a time when it has already destroyed much of her life and happiness. This choice is effective because it situates the reader in the aftermath of the loss, confronting the pain of it, while dealing out small snippets of the cause through flashbacks.

The grief that unfolds throughout the narrative is complex and multi-layered. Marin’s own grief encompasses her grandfather, her mother, her distance from Mabel, Ana and Javier, and even the life she thought she lived and the person she thought she was. The immensity of loss following her grandfather’s death came not just from his passing, but also from the truth of what he’d been keeping for her—her own mother. Gramps’s grief, too, becomes an object of study; though Marin initially struggles to see him as a man with pain of his own, she comes to understand that he has lost as much as her and still managed to keep their lives together for 15 years.