The Tiny One — Eliza Minot

Via Mahoney Revere is eight years old when her mother is killed in a car accident. Cast into the hollowness of grief, Via recalls and retells the day it happened in minute detail, trying to grasp the remarkableness of "how something so big could fit into such a little thing as a day." Each seemingly insignificant event in her day -- the school bus, social studies, math class -- calls up a recollection from her young life, creating a beautifully patterned tapestry of a comfortable childhood guarded by a warm and loving mother.

Via holds a microscope up to her day in the hope that, by examining the tiniest details, she will discover the crack in the world through which her mother must have slipped. In the process she extracts an extraordinary lesson from her first brutal encounter with the arbitrary and inscrutable forces of chance and accident: faced with death, she sees love and rejoices in her own living.