By Melissa Higgins
The one book here that actually walks a child through it, the police at the door, the first visit, the six years, told with a young rabbit standing in for your child.
Police come to the apartment at night. Dad is put in handcuffs and driven away, and one officer stays behind until Mom gets home, and hands the young rabbit a teddy bear. That's page one, and the book doesn't flinch from it. What follows is the whole shape of the thing: the social worker who answers questions, the first visit where Dad is behind glass and you talk to him on a phone, the later prison where you go through a metal detector and you can actually hug him. Dad will be there six years. Nobody ever says what he did. A support group starts a few weeks in, and letters and drawings go back and forth. Small fact boxes sit at the bottom of the pages explaining what a law is, why a visit can feel strange, and how many children in this country have a parent in prison.
Most books on this subject give a child feelings. This one gives them information, which is what a lot of children are actually starving for. It says the words out loud, jail, prison, sentence, arrest, so your child doesn't have to guess at what the grown-ups keep half-saying. The animal characters give just enough distance that a child can look straight at the arrest without it being their own front door. And the fact boxes do the loneliest job on this shelf: they tell your child how many other children are living this exact week.