By Corinne Demas
Lulu, the girl's old dog, goes slow, then blind, then deaf, and dies one afternoon while the girl is at school. Saying goodbye takes her the better part of a year.
Lulu and the girl who tells this story have done everything together: the yard games, the walks around the neighborhood, a story every night with Lulu up on the bed. Then Lulu gets old. Not sick, just old. She stops wanting to walk far. She goes blind, then deaf, and the girl starts feeding her by hand and holding the water bowl steady so she can drink. A big stretch of the book is just that, a child doing quiet, patient work for an animal who isn't going to get better. One ordinary afternoon the girl comes home from school and her mother tells her Lulu has died. They bury her in the yard. And then the girl can't say goodbye. Not that day, not for months. She's angry, then she goes blank, and a full turn of the seasons has to pass before she can stand at the tree they planted over Lulu and finally say it. At the end a new puppy shows up.
Most pet-death books open on the day the animal dies. This one is for the families already living the six months before it, the dog who can't do the stairs anymore, the child who has quietly turned into a nurse. It tells your child that stretch counts, and that it's its own kind of sad. Then it lets the grief run long. The girl misses the actual goodbye, because Lulu dies while she's at school, and the book doesn't smooth that over. If your child has gone silent and won't talk about it, or gone hard instead, here's a girl who took months and came out the other side. And it stays warm the whole way instead of bleak. Ard Hoyt's Lulu looks like a real dog, the kind you'd miss.