By Margaret M. Holmes
Sherman the raccoon saw something terrible, and the book never tells you what it was. It leaves that blank on purpose, so your child can put their own terrible thing there.
Sherman Smith saw the most terrible thing happen. That's the first line, and it's the last you'll hear about what the thing was. The book won't tell you. What it tells you instead is what happens to Sherman afterward: he tries not to think about it, he gets a bad stomach, he can't sleep, he has nightmares, he snaps at people who didn't do anything, he gets in trouble. Then a therapist named Ms. Maple asks him to draw, and slowly the drawing turns into telling, and the telling makes it smaller. Margaret Holmes wrote the terrible thing as a blank on purpose, so that one book could reach a child who saw a shooting, a car crash, a fire, a flood, or one grown-up hit another, without any of them having to read about somebody else's version.
The blank is the whole invention. Because the terrible thing is never named, your child isn't handed a scary picture and doesn't have to measure their own thing against a worse one. Everything Sherman feels afterward, though, is spelled out in plain detail. So the book can tell a frightened child the thing they may most need to hear: that the stomach ache and the nightmares and the short temper aren't a new personality, they're the fright coming out sideways, and they get smaller once somebody knows about them. It also puts a therapist on the page as an ordinary, kind person, which quietly makes seeing one a normal thing rather than a punishment. There are fifteen pages of notes for you in the back.