Something ugly happened, your child saw it or heard it, and now they have questions. One of these six books will be right, but you have to know which question you're answering first, because this shelf holds three different books for three different children and handing over the wrong one makes things worse. If your child saw something on a screen and wants to know what to do about it, that's Come With Me, and it's four minutes long. If your child worries about everything and always has, that's the workbook. And if something frightening actually happened to your child, or in front of them, that's the other two, and they were written by therapists for exactly that. Two more here are not comfort books at all. They're about a disaster, for the child who doesn't want soothing and wants to know what really happened. Read the notes before you choose, because these six do not do the same job.
Take one book off the shelf. What matters is telling the three groups apart. Come With Me is the one written directly at the problem in this shelf's title: the news is full of hatred, a girl asks her father what she can possibly do, and the answer is a coat and a subway ride and being decent to a stranger. If your child has been rattled by a screen and wants somewhere to put the feeling, take that one and stop reading here. Once I Was Very Very Scared and A Terrible Thing Happened are a different act entirely. They come out of clinical practice, therapists hand them out, and they are for a child who has been through something themselves — brilliant for that child and a mismatch for one who's only anxious about the world. What to Do When You Worry Too Much is a third thing again: a workbook with exercises that your child writes in over weeks, and it's really an anxiety tool rather than a news tool, so it fits here only partly and only for the child who worried before the news came on. Then there are two books that don't soothe at all. Two Bobbies is a true story about two animals abandoned in the Katrina flood, and it's sad. I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 puts an eleven-year-old in the water when the levees break. Both are for the child who wants to understand a thing they've heard about, which is a real and different appetite, and feeding it is not the same as calming anybody down.