By Michael Rosen
Michael Rosen wrote this after his son Eddie died. A father describes his own grief to children directly, and he never tidies it up or turns it into a lesson. Illustrated by Quentin Blake.
It opens with Rosen grinning right at you, and then he tells you the smile is a fake. He's smiling, he says, because he thinks people won't like him if he looks sad. After that he just describes what the sadness is like. His son Eddie died, and now the sadness shows up wherever it wants: walking down the street, sitting in a room, in the middle of a party, right when something nice is happening. Sometimes it gets so big he does things he shouldn't. Sometimes he's sad and can't say why. He also tells you what he does with it. He tries to do one thing each day he can be proud of, he talks about it, and on Eddie's birthday he lights a candle and sits with it. Quentin Blake's drawings carry half the book and often say the opposite of the words, so a bright party fills a whole page next to a line about not being able to feel any of it. It ends with Rosen sitting with that candle, still sad.
What sets this one apart is that the sadness belongs to a grown-up rather than a child, and for some children that's exactly why it reaches them. Rosen never tells your child what to do with a feeling. He just describes his own: it's huge, it arrives without warning, and he's still here. A child who has quietly wondered whether their own flat, heavy days are normal may find it steadying to hear an adult say 'sometimes I'm sad and I don't know why.' The first page, where Rosen grins and then admits he's only smiling so people will like him, may ring true for a child who holds it together at school and falls apart at home. Blake's drawings keep it bearable. They stay warm even at the lowest moments, and nothing on the page is frightening.