By Patrick Ness
Thirteen-year-old Conor's mother is dying of cancer, and a monster starts visiting him at night to force out the truth he can't bear to say.
Conor is thirteen. His mother has cancer, and the treatments have stopped working, though no one will quite say so. Since they began, he's had the same nightmare every night. Then, one night at seven minutes past midnight, a different monster comes to his window: an ancient yew tree that pulls itself up out of the churchyard and walks down the hill toward the house. It tells Conor it will come back to tell him three stories, and that when it's done, Conor has to tell it a fourth story of his own — the truth hidden inside his nightmare. His mother keeps getting sicker, the monster keeps returning, and the fourth story is the one Conor most wants to keep silent. Jim Kay's black-and-white illustrations run through the whole book.
It works because it makes grief frightening on purpose. The monster is genuinely scary, Jim Kay's illustrations are dark and beautiful, and underneath the horror-story surface it goes further than any other book here into the parts of grief that don't get said out loud — the guilt, the anger, and the wish for a long illness to just end. For an older child who's ready for it, the ending hits hard and leaves them lighter. It's also short and heavily illustrated, so it reaches a strong reader who normally won't touch a long book.