Corinna Burdette Timeline and Summary

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• Corinna starts eighth grade two weeks after her mom dies from cancer.
• She worries that the other kids will shun, make fun of, or pity her, but most are concerned with their own lives and therefore oblivious.
• Her soccer coach tells the team they should support her; her English teacher shares that her own mother died; the school counselor tells Corinna she can talk anytime she needs to. Her social studies teacher, on the other hand, is a jerk.
• Corinna comes home at night to a dad who's so caught up in his own grief he can't cook dinner. The kid eats a lot of canned chili.
• She starts to outgrow her clothes and tells her dad she needs new ones, but he keeps putting it off.
• Corinna's life improves a bit when she meets another eighth-grade girl named Clare, whose father died three years ago.
• Mrs. DuBoise starts a group for kids who have lost parents, and Corinna and Clare meet some other students who are grieving, too.
• She develops a crush on a boy named Alex and agonizes over whether or not he likes her, too—until he proves that he does when they kiss at the end-of-the-year dance.
• The summer after eighth grade, Corinna's dad takes her to Japan, a trip they were planning to take with her mom, who was once an exchange student in Tokyo.
• Corinna and her dad meet Sophie's former host family, the Ishibashis, and their adult daughter, Aiko, takes the Burdettes to a temple in Kyoto, where they learn about Obon, the festival of the dead.
• Corinna returns to America and makes a shrine to Sophie in their home. She begins to practice the rituals she learned in Japan to honor (and symbolically communicate with) her mom.
• On the first day of ninth grade, Corinna's dad drops her off at school, and she thinks she sees him smile again. She and her best friend, Joci, having reconciled, walk into the building to start high school together.