Each story in Graveyard Girl has its own theme, but virtually all of them focus on some aspect of one of the developmental tasks that adolescents encounter as they live through their teen years. Some of the stories, for example, deal with adolescents' developing new relationships with their parents, but their achieving those new relationships is shown to be complicated by factors such as parental divorce, remarriage, or abuse. Themes are repeated in Graveyard Girl so that readers are exposed to many aspects of the same theme. First love, for instance, can be found in many stories, including "You Never Knew," "Rabbits," "Bodies," and "K is for Kristmas."

A unifying theme for the entire collection would have to be the idea of resolution because, at the conclusion of the stories, the central characters have achieved some type of resolution regarding their problems. But the...