By Oliver Jeffers
A little girl loses someone who shared the whole world with her, so she puts her heart in a bottle to keep it safe. She stops hurting, but she also stops noticing anything at all.
There's a little girl who's curious about everything: the stars, the sea, all the creatures in it. She shares every bit of it with a grown-up who sits in a big chair, reads to her, and answers her endless questions. The pictures show an older man, often read as a father or grandfather. Then one day she runs to the chair and it's empty. He's gone, and the book never explains more than that. She doesn't know what to do with the ache, so she decides the safest thing is to take her heart out of her chest and keep it in a bottle around her neck. It works, after a fashion, and the hurting stops. But the world goes gray and small, and the wonder drains out of it. Years pass with her heart corked away, until she meets a young child who's full of all the curiosity she used to have. She wants her heart back. By then it's stuck fast in the bottle, and it takes that small child to get it out for her.
This is the gentlest book of its kind, which is what makes it a place to start rather than one you work up to. It never names who died or how, so it fits almost any family's loss, whoever it was that shared your child's world. And its real subject is the part of grief that's hardest to put into words: how a person can close themselves off to keep from hurting, and lose the good along with the bad. It's told almost entirely in Jeffers's spare pictures, which is why it reaches a very young child without overwhelming one.