By Caron Levis
Two polar bears in a city park zoo have been best friends their whole lives, and then one of them gets sick and doesn't get better.
Gus and Ida are polar bears who share a rocky pool in a park in the middle of a big, loud city. They have their routine: they wrestle, they nap, they call across the rocks to each other, they listen to the traffic hum. Then a keeper tells Gus that Ida is sick, and that she isn't going to get better. The book stays right there, in the long middle. Gus is angry, then he acts like nothing is wrong, then he can't stop crying. Ida has her bad days and her good ones. In between they still play and still laugh, and Ida shows him where to find her afterward: in the sounds of the city, in their favorite corners, in the wind. Then one day she dies, and Gus finds out she was right. Two polar bears really did live in the Central Park Zoo, and their friendship is underneath all of this.
Almost every gentle grief book starts after the death and skips ahead to comfort. This one lives in the waiting, when someone is sick and everyone knows and the ordinary days keep coming anyway. That's where a lot of families actually are. It also lets Gus grieve badly. He's furious one afternoon, silly the next, nothing like the brave little mourner most picture books offer, and a child who has been angry or clownish since hard news may find that more of a relief than a lesson would be. Charles Santoso's art is so soft and warm that the hardest pages stay bearable, and because Gus and Ida are bears, there's a little space between your child and what's happening.