For the child facing the hardest kind of loss there is — not a grandparent at the far end of a long life, but someone their own age, a friend or a brother or a sister, gone too soon. Maybe it has already happened in your family and you need a book that tells the truth about it. Maybe it hasn't, and you would rather they meet this kind of grief first on a page, with you beside them. Start here, with the gentlest one, and know that each book after it asks a little more. Nothing on this trail pretends the loss away, and nothing leaves your child there without a way back.
What climbs on this trail is not reading difficulty so much as how close the loss comes and how much of it a child is asked to feel. It opens as softly as a true death book can — a short, plainly told classic about a boy whose best friend dies on an ordinary summer day — and then rises. The middle of the trail is about losing a friend: the famous, sudden loss of Leslie in 'Bridge to Terabithia', and the quieter, more inward grief of a girl who copes by turning her friend's drowning into a science mystery. From there the losses move inside the family and get heavier: a girl who loses her father and sister and is then abandoned by her mother, and a girl who watches her adored older sister slowly die. It ends at the summit — the sudden, accidental death of a three-year-old brother, carried by a sister who blames herself. The order lets a child warm up to real feeling by degrees, so that when the hardest book comes, they are ready to be moved by it rather than flattened.