By Sharon Creech
A boy who swears he hates poetry keeps writing anyway, and the poem he's been circling all along turns out to be about his dog.
Jack does not want to write poems. Poetry is for girls, it makes no sense, and anyway he has nothing to say — that is how the book opens, in a few grumpy lines scrawled for his teacher, Miss Stretchberry. But she keeps handing him poems to read, and week by week he starts writing back almost in spite of himself. His lines get longer and braver, and you slowly realize they have been circling one thing the whole time: a yellow dog named Sky, and what happened to him. The whole novel is Jack's notebook, one dated entry at a time, and the boy who had nothing to say turns out to have a lot of it.
The whole book is maybe twenty minutes of reading, spare verse with a lot of white space, so it never feels heavy in the hand. And yet by the end it has, almost without your child noticing, told the story of a beloved dog's death and a boy learning to say so out loud. For a child who's nervous about sad books, or who's decided poetry isn't for them, this one gets past both worries at the same time.