By Pat Thomas
A direct little guide to death for young children: it explains what dying is in plain words, then stops every few pages to ask your child how they feel.
It opens by saying that every day someone is born and every day someone dies, and then it gets specific: when someone dies their body stops working. They stop breathing, their heart stops, they can't think or feel anything, and they don't eat or sleep. It goes on to why people die — old age, an illness that lasts a long time, an illness that comes on fast, an injury — and it explains what a funeral is and what happens at one. Lesley Harker's pictures are soft and round, full of ordinary families. The thing that makes it different is the boxes: every few pages the book stops and asks 'What about you?' How do you feel, who would you tell, what do you remember. Pat Thomas is a psychotherapist, and the shape of the book shows it. Half the pages are really your child's to fill in.
It's the one to reach for when your child has gone quiet on you. Some children who won't answer 'how are you feeling' will answer a book instead, maybe because the book isn't watching their face and doesn't need anything back. The questions here are gentler than the ones you'd think to ask, and they let a child say a small true thing rather than a big one. It's also the plainest of the death books, with no allegory, no falling leaves, no metaphor to wait for. And the plain sentence about the body stopping working may be the most useful line in it, because that's the part a small child is often confused about and the part grown-ups find hardest to say out loud.