Seven picture books for a young child who has lost someone, or is about to, or has just started asking where people go. Any one of them does the job. You pick the one that matches who your family lost and how old your child is, and you leave the other six alone. They are gentle in how they tell it. Not one of them pretends nobody died.
Gentle here means how it's told, not how much it weighs. Every book on this shelf carries a real death and most of them will put a lump in your throat before your child's; what makes them gentle is that the sadness arrives softly, in few words and big pictures, with nothing frightening to look at and nothing left menacing. The fastest way in is to ask who your family actually lost. A pet is 'The Tenth Good Thing About Barney'. A grandparent is 'Cry, Heart, But Never Break'. A friend is 'Ida, Always' or 'City Dog, Country Frog'. A parent or the grown-up who held your child's whole world is 'The Heart and the Bottle'. When you'd rather not put a name to it — or the loss is complicated, or old, or not yours to explain — 'The Memory Box' leaves the blank open on purpose. Then check the ages: the four books for the youngest end at eight, and the two hardest, 'Cry, Heart' and 'The Heart and the Bottle', want six and up and a grown-up in the room. And a note about 'The Invisible String', which opens the shelf: it isn't really a grief book. It's about missing people, with one soft line about an uncle who died in it. That's why it's a good place to start, and why it's the only one you can safely read to a child who isn't grieving at all.