By Mem Fox
A small boy who lives beside an old people's home goes looking for what a memory actually is, so he can hand one back to ninety-six-year-old Miss Nancy next door, who has lost hers.
Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge is a little boy with a very long name, and he lives right next door to a home for old people, where he knows everyone. His favorite is Miss Nancy Alison Delacour Cooper, partly because she has four names too. One day he overhears his parents say that poor Miss Nancy has lost her memory. Wilfrid isn't sure what a memory even is, so he asks around the home. Something warm, says one person. Something from long ago. Something that makes you cry, and something that makes you laugh. Something as precious as gold. So Wilfrid goes home and fills a basket with his own treasures, a warm egg from under a hen, a shell, an old medal, a puppet, a football, and carries them to Miss Nancy one at a time. As she holds each one, a memory of her own comes floating back.
What makes this one land is that Wilfrid gets a job to do instead of a sadness to sit with. The book never says the words Alzheimer's or dementia. It just shows a boy who loves an old woman and finds his way to her, one small object at a time. For a child with a grandparent who is starting to slip, that matters: the forgetting here is something you can reach into, not only something to grieve. Julie Vivas's watercolors are loose and full of light, so the whole book feels tender rather than heavy.