By Glenn Ringtved
Four children try to keep Death busy all night so he can't climb the stairs and take their dying grandmother. He turns out gentler than they feared, and instead of hurrying he sits down and tells them a story.
Death arrives at the house in a long cloak, and he leaves his scythe outside the door so as not to frighten the children. Their grandmother is very ill upstairs. The four of them figure out what he's come for and make a plan: keep pouring him coffee, keep asking questions, keep him at the table until morning, because surely he can't take her in daylight. Death drinks the coffee. He knows what they're doing. Then the youngest asks him straight out why their grandmother has to die. Instead of answering, he tells them about two gloomy brothers, Sorrow and Grief, and the two sisters they came to love, Joy and Delight, and how neither pair meant anything without the other. Then he goes upstairs. The author wrote the book while his own mother was dying and he couldn't find the words for his own children. The title is what she said to him.
If your child has started asking the real question — why do people have to die — this is a book that answers it instead of brushing it off. The answer it gives is that grief and joy are two sides of one coin, and it gives that answer as a story rather than a lecture, which is why a six- or seven-year-old can actually hold onto it. Making Death a character is the reason the whole thing works. He's tired and gentle and a little sad about his job, so the scariest thing a child can imagine becomes someone sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee. Charlotte Pardi's illustrations are loose and a bit raw, never cute or comforting in the easy way.