By Cynthia Rylant
A comfort book for a child whose dog has died, and its comfort is openly Christian: it tells them she's in Heaven now, running fields God made for her and eating the biscuits He shapes like cats.
There's no plot to speak of. The dog is already dead when the book opens, and the rest of it is one long, warm answer to the question your child is asking. Dog Heaven has fields that go on forever, because dogs need room to run, and lakes to swim in, and biscuits shaped like cats, and ham sandwiches. God is right in the middle of it, not off somewhere distant: He made the fields, He makes sure the biscuits taste good, He hands out clouds to sleep on, and He pets the dogs Himself. Angel children throw them balls. And the dogs are allowed to come back down and visit the houses they used to live in, look in the window at the family that loved them, and then go home to God. Rylant painted it herself, in big flat bright colors a child might have chosen, nothing somber anywhere on the page. It's been in print for thirty years.
It's certain, and a young child in the middle of grief may be starving for something certain. A lot of pet books hand a child a burial and a memory; this one hands them an address — a specific place, with fields and biscuits, where their dog is right now. For a child who may be lying awake picturing their dog cold in the ground, that can be an enormous relief, and Rylant pulls it off without a drop of syrup. Dog Heaven is funny and physical and full of running. The pictures carry a lot of it: flat, bright, childlike, nothing grim on the page. And the visiting is the part that undoes me — the dogs come back and look in the window at their old families. For a child whose whole grief is that she's gone and can't be reached, that page says more than any amount of explaining.