By Doris Buchanan Smith
A boy's best friend dies on an ordinary summer afternoon, and he has to find his way through the days that follow.
Jamie is the best friend who dares you into things and plays to a crowd. One warm afternoon a bunch of the neighborhood children are picking Japanese beetles off a neighbor's flowers, and Jamie starts poking at a hole full of bees, laughing off every warning. When the bees swarm, everyone scatters. The narrator, tired of Jamie's showing off, heads home for a popsicle. That turns out to be the last ordinary moment. Jamie was allergic to bee stings and nobody knew, and he dies from them that afternoon. The rest of this short book follows the boy left behind through the strange days after: not believing it, half-expecting Jamie to knock on the door, and a small guilt that won't quit, the fear that if he had stayed he might have done something. It ends where it started, out picking blackberries.
It's short and plainly written, which is the whole reason it works as a first book about death. A child who has never met a loss in a story can get through it in a sitting or two without being flooded. And it doesn't rush the boy along: it lets him be confused, a little guilty, and slowly sad, at a child's pace. For a child near a real loss, or just old enough to start wondering about death, it's a gentle place to feel it with you nearby.