All the Dangerous Things follows a grieving mother as she seeks her missing son. Isabelle’s first-person narration grants the reader a visceral understanding of her motivations and desires, as well as her mourning her son, her estranged relationship with her husband, and the deaths of her younger sisters during their childhood. As she searches for answers, she encounters other people experiencing grief. Isabelle’s interactions showcase the nonlinear nature of grief, framing each person’s path to healing as different and underscoring the unfairness of comparing responses to loss.

Because Isabelle is the narrator, the reader is most familiar with her relationship with grief. Early in the novel, she ruminates on an article she wrote about a dolphin whose calf died. The dolphin mourned its child by pushing the corpse around in the water; when Isabelle asked a dock hand how long she would do so, he responded, “As long as it takes to grieve” (63). This observation mirrors Isabelle’s grieving of her younger sister Margaret and her son, Mason. Although Isabelle has allegedly healed from the trauma of losing Margaret, her flashbacks and frequent references to her sister show how present Margaret is in her thoughts. Isabelle’s unresolved trauma informs her suspicion that she hurt Mason, requiring a conversation with her mother, who also struggled with motherhood, for closure.