The selection “Shoofly Pie” by Naomi Shihab Nye is about a young girl struggling with grief. After the death of her mother, Mattie wasn’t sure what she was going to do for work. Getting a job at a local restaurant, Mattie threw herself into cooking, like she did for her late mother. She made new relationships at the restaurant, and she met others who knew the struggles that grief can cause a person. Between honoring her mother through cooking and relating to other co-workers about grief, she found a way to cope with her mother's death and move on to the next stage of her life. The short story is extremely well written because of the author’s use of vivid imagery and symbolism to describe the struggles of grief. The author creates imagery by