By Patrice Karst
A short picture book built around one comforting idea: an invisible string of love ties your child to everyone they love, and it stretches however far it has to. Parents and counselors reach for it at drop-off, at bedtime, and sometimes when a child is missing someone.
Two children wake up scared in the middle of a thunderstorm and run to their mom. Instead of just tucking them back in, she tells them about the Invisible String, a string made of love that ties each of us to everyone we love, so we're never really alone. Hers reaches them even when they're in another room. Theirs reach to a friend across town, to Mom while she's at work, to family who live far away, and to an uncle who has died. The whole book rests on that one picture: love stretches as far as it needs to and doesn't break when people are apart. It's short, and it's the one a lot of parents and school counselors keep on hand for a child who gets anxious about being away from the people they love.
If you've got a tender-hearted child, the one who cries at drop-off, drags out bedtime, or worries the whole time you're gone, this hands them something they can actually picture. Not a lecture about how you'll always come back, but a string of love they can imagine holding. It stays useful longer than most comfort books because it works for more than one thing: the everyday goodbye, and, when a family needs it, a first gentle talk about someone who has died. Mine asked for it on plenty of ordinary nights.