By Jane Resh Thomas
Seven-year-old Suzie goes to her grandmother's funeral, and the book walks your child through the whole day with her, hour by hour.
Grandma has died. Suzie is seven, and she and her mom and dad drive back to the little seaside town where her parents grew up. Suzie doesn't know what a funeral is going to be like, and she's frightened of it, so the book shows her. The house full of relatives. The funeral home, and the casket, and going in to say goodbye. Cousins she barely knows, and the two of them ending up playing capture the flag in the room where the empty caskets are stored, because that's what children do when the grown-ups aren't watching. Her grandfather crying, and her mother crying. The service the next day, the drive to the grave, the burial. And then the big buffet at the church afterward, where everyone eats too much and tells stories and laughs, and Suzie works out that this is what a funeral is: a family kind of day, sad and funny at the same time.
Most books about a death are about the feeling. This one is about the day. If your family has a funeral coming and your child has never been to one, they're probably picturing something worse than what's real, and this hands them the sequence: the house full of relatives, the casket, the grown-ups crying, the food afterward. It's from 1988 and it looks it, and that doesn't matter, because what a scared seven-year-old needs is to know what happens next. The capture-the-flag scene is the reason I'd trust it. It knows children get bored and silly at a funeral, and it doesn't scold them for it.