By Trudy Krisher
A girl who has loved hats her whole life gets cancer, and once chemo takes her hair the hats turn from dress-up into the thing that hides her bald head. She's angry through most of it, and the book closes with her two years cancer-free.
Kathy has loved hats since she was a baby; her mother says she wore one home from the hospital. Birthday hats, dress-up hats, a hat for whatever the weather is doing. Then she's diagnosed with cancer, treatment starts, and her hair falls out. A hat isn't a game after that. It's what covers the head she doesn't want anyone looking at, and she hates it, both the hat and the fact that she needs one. The change over the book is in Kathy, not in her situation. She gets to a place where a hat is something she chooses instead of something she hides behind. The last page is her whole class in hats, throwing them up in the air, because she's been cancer-free for two years.
If your child is about to lose their hair to chemo, this is the one I'd hand them. What makes it land is that Kathy is allowed to be furious. She doesn't accept the hat gracefully or find the silver lining by page four; she resents all of it, which is what a child in that stretch is often feeling and almost never sees on a page. The hats give her one thing to be in charge of at a time when she's in charge of very little. Trudy Krisher wrote it about her own daughter, and the small true details show it: the wig that itches, the way people look and then look away. It came out in 1992, so the art is soft and a bit of its era, and I still haven't found anything since that does this particular job as well.