Via Revere is eight years old when her mother is killed in a car wreck on a winter road in Massachusetts. Cast into the anguish of grief, totally bewildered by her mother's disappearance, and mystified by the notion of death itself, Via tries to hold on to her mother in the only way she knows how: by remembering, in excruciating detail, the day her mother died.

"The Tiny One" captures a single day in the life of a young child grappling with immeasurable grief and loss. But mainly Via holds a microscope up to her day in the hope that if she musters all of her eight-year-old good sense, she can riddle out death's logic, and find the crack in the world through which her mother must have slipped. Minot gives us a young narrator whose innate wisdom has something to teach us all -- a child who extracts a remarkable lesson from her first brutal encounter with the arbitrary, inscrutable forces of chance and accident. This is the story of a girl who has a reckoning with death and comes, instinctively, to what remains: to love, and through love, to life.