By Leo Buscaglia
An allegory about death and the life cycle: Freddie the leaf watches the year turn cold, asks his older friend whether leaves die, and is told yes.
Freddie is a leaf on a big tree in a park. He buds out in spring, spends a whole summer up there, and his best friend is Daniel, a bigger, older leaf on the same branch who seems to understand how everything works. Then the days cool, the leaves go red and gold, and they start letting go and drifting down. Freddie sees it and asks Daniel the plain question: does this mean we die too? Daniel tells him yes. Freddie says it isn't fair, he never did anything wrong, and he wants to know why he was even here if he was only going to fall. Daniel answers by talking about the shade they gave all summer, the old people who sat under the tree, the way the seasons come and go, and how the tree itself will go on and grow new leaves in spring. Then Daniel lets go. Not long after, Freddie does too, settling softly onto the snow. Photographs of real leaves and real branches carry the whole book, and it's short enough to read in one sitting.
It earns its place with a child who's frightened for themselves rather than sad about a particular person. Somewhere around four or five it can dawn on a child that this happens to everybody, and that fear is hard to talk about head-on, partly because it's hard for you too. Freddie asks the question out loud and gets answered by someone calm, which is easier than starting the conversation cold. And because the whole thing happens to leaves, a child can hold the idea at arm's length and set it down whenever they've had enough. It also gives dying a shape a child has already seen with their own eyes. They've kicked through leaf piles. They know the tree looks bare in winter and green again by April. That's something familiar to hang a very big idea on.