By Trish Cooke
Grandad has died before the book opens, and Vin and Leigh find his whole life folded into the apple tree they grew up under.
There's an apple tree in the garden, and Vin and Leigh have climbed it and played under it their whole lives. It changes with the seasons and stays the same tree, and their grandad was like that too. He was a baby once. He was a boy in the Caribbean who climbed coconut trees to look out at the sea. He grew up, got married, had a family, and became Grandad, the man who sat in that garden and played his fiddle for all of them. Then he died. The book says it straight, and gently: sometimes things die, like trees, like people, like Grandad. So Vin plays the fiddle now, the way Grandad did, and when Leigh is sad, the two of them plant a seed beside the apple tree and look after it together.
Most of these pages are Grandad alive — a baby, a boy up a coconut tree, a man with a fiddle — so the dying ends up being one small part of a long life instead of the whole of it. Your child comes away holding a person, not an absence. The tree helps here: it gives them something they can see and touch that carries the idea, and for a lot of children at this age that kind of concrete anchor does more than any explanation. Sharon Wilson's pastels are warm and close and crowded with family. It's a Black family too, drawn with real tenderness, which is still rare on this shelf.