By Bryan Mellonie
A quiet, secular picture book that tells a young child every living thing has a beginning, an end, and a lifetime in between, and that dying is part of living.
It starts with plants. Then insects, birds, fish, rabbits, and finally people, and it says the same small thing about each one: living things are born, they live, and then they die, and the living part in the middle is their lifetime. Some lifetimes are long. Some are very short, and the book says that plainly instead of stepping around it. Robert Ingpen paints all of it in soft, exact watercolors that look like they belong in a nature book, not a grief book. There's no story here and no character. Nobody's grandmother appears and nobody cries. It's forty pages of one calm idea, put to your child in the plainest words anyone has yet managed on this subject.
It works because it doesn't perform. A young child who asks what dead means is often after the plain fact before they're after comfort, and this answers that one question and nothing else, in about sixty words a small child already knows. Starting with seeds and beetles gives them somewhere safe to try the idea on before it reaches people, which is why it can land for a child years younger than most of this shelf. And because it never mentions God, it stays out of your way. Whatever your family believes, this book won't say it for you; you say it yourself, in your own words, on the last page.