Off My Bookshelf: Code Name Verity

Review: Paper Butterflies

Paper Butterflies

This book made me cry. For real. Actual tears people, actual tears. I read it on holiday, alone in my hotel room after a day skiing. Or rather, I started it on the plane and then finished it in my hotel room and I had to text my friend and tell him I needed rescuing because I had a massive sad. When he rang me to ask what on earth I was talking about I burst into tears, which, well way to go Jo, way to go.

‘What’s it about,’ he asked me when he came to save me and take me for vin chaud, and then ‘Jesus Christ’ when I told him.

‘What happens in the end?’

I don’t know,’ I told him, ‘I’ve got a few percent left to go.’

Then a pause….’is it not a true story?’

‘No.’

And then he laughed, because (and this is not the first time this has happened) it's apparently hilarious that I can get so emotionally attached to things and people that aren’t even real, except of course they totally are real in my head and I kind of feel like it’s a testament to how good a book is, if it can move me like that.

Review: Salt to the Sea

I already knew I was going to love Salt to the Sea. I also already knew it was going to make me feel all the things. That it was going to hurt. I was right. 

I mean it didn’t hurt as much as Between Shades of Gray - which FYI I am still not over, will likely never be over – but still, it kind of got me right in the chest because Ruta Sepetys has this way of making you feel like you’re actually living the words on the page and the words on the page whilst utterly beautiful do not depict the happiest of times. I mean I won’t lie; I went into this book with an actual sense of dread. At the very best this would be bittersweet; it very likely wouldn’t even be that and yet, I wanted to read it so badly.

Salt to the Sea is set in 1945. The second World War is drawing to a close and thousands upon thousands of refugees are desperately making their way to what they can only hope will be freedom; a second chance; a new start. Our story for the main part is that of a Lithuanian nurse, a Prussian soldier, a young Polish girl (and a young strangely desperate and completely sociopathic Nazi.)

They first three, and the people they’re travelling with are desperate to board a ship (the Wilhelm Gustloff, which, please please Google it. It makes the Titanic look like a storm in a teacup. 1053 lives were lost when the Titanic sank; around 9400 lives were lost when the Wilhelm Gustloff went down) which will take them to some kind of promised land – any place will be better probably than what they’re walking away from. & they are walking, they’re walking miles.

Sepetys picks you up, and she unceremoniously sets you down in that abandoned barn, on that dusty road, on that harbour where people are fighting to be allowed passage; your feet hurt and your hearts hurts and your stomach rumbles and you’re lonely and terrified and still somehow kind of hopeful and you feel like you know Joana who has left so much behind and is carrying around all this guilt and yet still puts everyone else before herself; the Poet who you just want to love and protect because he’s this old man and he’s seen so much; Florian who pretends he’s tough but you know really isn’t and who has secrets of his own; Emilia who, well, hers is a story that you need to read really, but be prepared for your heart to fracture. You know them and you love them and you ache for them more so because whilst you know that they perhaps didn’t exist, thousands like them did, that those things happened to very real people and there’s no hiding from it.

There’s this one scene where a woman throws her baby at the ship so desperate is she to make sure that her child gets away from what has become a living hell and I swear I made this weird sort of keening noise. It’s two sentences at most and it still hurts like a sucker punch. It hurts because it might not be true but yet it still really is. This shit happened, Jesus look at the world right now. This shit is still happening and I don’t know perhaps that’s what makes this book so powerful and so poignant. What happened here, 70 years ago and that seems so atrocious and so unbelievable is a thing we’re seeing every time we turn on the television (and don’t get me started on how my stomach dropped when I drove through Calais a couple of weeks ago) It’s unreal but it’s so real. It’s unreal that it happened then, but it did. It’s unreal that it’s still happening, and yet. And yet.

Sepetys has a talent. Not many people could write a novel with 4 very different, equally strong voices and not have you feeling lost of overpowered. Sepetys does, each character is important, each story matters and despite the switch from one point of view to another the story doesn’t lose pace for a second. & God but it’s well researched. SO well researched.

Has it gotten under my skin like Between Shades of Gray? No, but I think perhaps that’s because I was prepared for it . I went into BSoG not knowing what I was about to read; I went into this with my heart protected in a layer of bubble wrap. However, this, like Between Shades of Gray is a story of survival, of hope when everything seems hopeless and the sheer strength of the human spirit. It’s a difficult book, but it’s one that is so worth reading because it’s important and it’s beautiful. And there’s a nod to Between Shades of Gray in there too which made my fangirl heart flutter.

This Is A Post About Me

This week has been a week, not a terrible week but not a great week either. Seems like sometimes That Break Up feels so much more raw than it has any right to be really, this far down the line, and it’s hard to get past the fact that my heart just hurts. I’ve totally self medicated though, with OItNB and new bedding and San Pellegrino. It’s been a week of being in bed by 8 pretty much every day, but whatever.

Soooooo, the week might have been pretty miserable but I will not be defeated because now? Well, first of all there’s THAT HARRY POTTER NEWS. You’ve all heard that by now right? That JK Rowling has confirmed that a new Harry Potter play will be coming to the London stage next year? It’s called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and whilst she’s keeping all her cards v close to her chest like she does, she has said it’s not a prequel. I have all the feelings. I am simultaneously excited and nervy (I am not so good with the unknown. The unknown makes me very anxious) and you just know that I (along with oh, the rest of the world) will spend some time in London Town next year. Ha. 

So, there’s that. There’s also the weekend. Hurrah. It’s going to be a good one. LEMME TELL YOU AAAAAALLL ABOUT IT.

I’m meeting Helen for lunch any minute. Helen’s baby is due in August (I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS FACT YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW) and she’s easing herself into her mat leave; last Friday marked her last Friday at work and we’re celebrating that fact today with lunch just because we can. Hurrah. Sometimes all you need is a bit of QT with your BFF you know?

Time with Helen is different to time with anyone else and it’s my best. Last week we met up and visited her nephew before we went to Maccies and then just huddled under blankets on her sofa to watch Before I Go To Sleep which mostly meant we talked shit to each other the whole way through, renamed the characters, got very angry at Mr Darcy being a badass, criticised Kidman’s hair, and generally took the film nowhere near as seriously as we should have done thus missing a few important plot points. I can’t do that stuff with anyone but her.

This evening my pal Jane and I are headed to Hoyster’s for dinner. 

Look how lush it is. You wanna come, right?

Prosecco on tap, this is not a drill.

Prosecco. On. Tap.

For some reason I see lots of prosecco in my future. Also tapas. Oh, all the tapas.  Jane and I often have these grand plans of big nights out and cocktails and living the high life. The truth though? We’re eating at 6.30 so do not be surprised if we’re tucked up in bed for 11. Ha. We’re the most rock and roll. I’m excited because I haven’t been out since Before the Break-Up so you know, it’ll be fun to dress up and drink bubbles and let my hair down a while.

Tomorrow I’m getting my culture on with a matinee performance of Dreamers at Oldham Coliseum. It's a new comedy musical about a group of girls in 90's Manchester: small town nights out, friendship and 90's Indie classics. I am all over that. I’m going with my friend Natalie – the show was co-written by her sister in law, which is super cool. Then, we’re heading back to Natalie’s for takeaway food (I hope Chinese. Nat, if you’re reading this, shall we have Chinese?) and a film – we’ve mentioned Selma as we missed it at the cinema. It will be a delightful day of delightfulness and will probably involve us making plans for when we go to London in October to see Cumberbatch as Hamlet. Nat was all Cumberbatch crazy until I gently pointed her in the direction of Elementary. She’s seen the (Jonny Lee Miller shaped) light, naturally because how could you not when he’s that sexy, but she still has a soft spot for old BC and me? Well I just like London and the theatre and cocktails so you know, fun times. We’re going to do Hamlet and hit up some of the galleries and find some awesome cocktail bars and generally just spend a weekend being super sophisticated. I’ll follow Natalie’s lead on that then, I know: I am the least sophisticated of them all...

On Sunday I have a blissful ZERO PLANS, but whatever I end up doing it will not involve food. [& next week will involve a lot of gym time. That cross trainer and I will become very well acquainted] I might just drive home, and watch the rest of the first season of Grimm in bed. Yep. That sounds like it could be a plan. I’m still on the fence about Grimm. Ems and I watched six episodes the other Sunday which means I have to finish it, because I’m too far into it not to, but I’m not sure that I love it, yet. I might also finish my book.  I’m reading The Beach Hut at the moment, which is brill and marv. I love the way Cassandra Parkin writes. I also love that the beach in the book is based around Perranporth. I love Perranporth. Anyway, I’ll talk about it properly when I’m done but in the meantime, you can (and should) get a copy here. Next on the list is the new Rosamund Lupton The Quality of Silence which is out next week and which as a lover of Sister I am super excited about.

I’ve also been house-hunting which is both exciting and terrible. I have a lot of emotions about it, and if I let me think about it properly then I get rather weepy but, well, the actual ‘let’s find a cool place to live,’ that’s sort of fun. I feel like I’ve found the perfect place, actually. . It’s at the upper end of my budget, as in the very most I would be prepared to pay right now, which is obviously not ideal: the higher my living costs the lower my savings/book money, but it’s beautiful, so beautiful. I’ve even been furnishing it in my head this week which is perhaps not sensible. So, I made a deal with myself: it’s not even available til August, so, if it’s still on the market this time next month I’m going to go and view it. If it’s not, well, then it was never meant to be and I shall find somewhere less beautiful and less expensive. This is my plan.

Well, This Sucks.

What I learn as I grow older is that most things don't last forever. It's hard though, to know how to keep going when the things you thought would, don't.

That's where I'm at right now.

Things have changed a little bit (and by ‘a little bit’ I mean 'enormously') because there has been A Break Up. Yup, that’s right: I had been in a relationship for seven and a half years until, well, now.

Now I'm not.

Now, I am single and not at ALL 'ready to mingle.' What even is that phrase anyway? Ready to curl up and die perhaps, if that's the same. I don't think it is.

Crikey.

How dramatic does that sound? Some days I raise my eyebrows at myself.  On the bad days though, it doesn't feel dramatic enough. On the better days, like today I just sort of paint on a smile and pretend like on the inside I'm not falling apart.

It turns out that whilst I was planning the rest of our lives together, he was realising he perhaps wasn't in love with me after all. I have a lot of feelings about that, most of them centred around pain and confusion but you know, I don't want to be one of those people who airs her dirty laundry in public. Besides which, I still love the guy: there are things I could say, in pain and in anger that I would no doubt only come to regret later. If you're expecting this to be a messy post, a gory 'what went wrong' or an angry 'I hate him so much right now' then I can only apologise because you won't find that here.

The whole break-up (ow that still fucking hurts) made me do a lot of thinking though, a lot of pondering over the (un)certainty of love and the fragility of human relationships and how much of a leap of faith it is to believe in the things people say: how words, even the nice ones - especially the nice ones - have the power to wound.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

I'm sorry, I call bullshit. 

Words hurt more than anything. An I love you that turns out not to be true, a forever that isn't quite that long, a brutally simple it's over, those are words that hurt like a knife through the heart and have the power to make you crumble even as you fight to remain upright.

So what do you do (when your good isn't good enough, she sings lustily and a little off key because she'll always be a too-old Glee fangirl); when it all falls apart, how do you get through the day? 

Sadly, I cannot tell you what will work for you should you ever end up where I am (and I hope to god that you don't). I can only tell you what seems to be working for me, if you can call it that. (It doesn't feel like it's working. It feels like I'm driving in fog, and I have no idea really what anything looks like. I'm following the tail lights of the car in front just to get through the day.)

So, in case you were you know, interested, here it is: Josephine's break-up survival kit:

Fruit gums. For real. My relationship with food is the opposite of healthy, especially in times of stress and I'm struggling right now to finish a meal. You know what I am eating though? Rowntree’s Fruit Gums. I can't get enough of those babies. I say to you, then, should someone ever drop your heart from the top of a skyscraper, that if you don't feel like eating a masterchef quality meal then don't. Your heart is broken; you're allowed to feel sick to your stomach. It's fine. It's also fine to eat a full bag of fruit gums (large bar of chocolate, multipack of crisps) if you like. Just you know, be aware they can't sustain you for ever.

Glee. Thank the Lord for Amazon Prime oh my god. If it weren't for Blaine Anderson and his, well his everything, then the whole actual 'breaking up' part of this break up would have been so much more crippling than it was. As it is, I watched Glee again, and was granted a tiny reprieve from the mess that is my life for the length of an episode and was unreasonably grateful for it. 

Also Once Upon A Time. And The Vampire Diaries.

And Arrow, which I totally watch for the plot.

Shut up. I do. Why would you even doubt me?!

The thing about television is that it is absolute escapism, and shows like Glee require zero thought, zero energy, you don't even need to turn the page. Let the singing teenagers do their thing and make it all marginally better for that our before you turn out the light and manage not to sleep. Oh sleep, how I miss you.

Tears. I've cried a sea of them and I'm fine with that. I'm not just mourning the years we had together, I'm mourning the years I thought we still had to come. I'm crying for my love for him which feels misplaced and my trust in him which feels abused. I'm crying because I really don't know what the hell else I am supposed to do, because I feel stupid and lost and alone, because I feel worthless and ugly and so so confused.

I'm crying because quite simply, it hurts. 

There's a strange kind of peace that comes from a good cry, the body-shaking, snot-nosed, wailing that leaves you with a headache. Sometimes a cry gives me what I need to get out of bed the next day and carry on. So my advice to anyone: if You've got a bruised heart, then cry, just cry

A book. A good book. Hours that would have been spent with my sweetie are now left empty. Of course I fill them with a book. Have you met me? It's a good job I think that my TBR is mountainous (perhaps that's what he dropped my heart off of, the top of my TBR. He always did say I had too many books) because I will never be short of reading material. Live to read. Read to Live ,and right now reading kind of is what I'm living for. I'm not all that fond of my world right now, I'm glad to hang out in someone else's. Although it’s funny because my concentration is shot to hell and a book I could probably read in a day normally is taking me upwards of a week. I’m enjoying doing the reading, it’s just taking me so long. I’ve read and loved Last Night in Montreal, Jakob’s Colours, The Time in Between and The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland…recently. Check them out.

My friends. And my parents. They're the best. The ones on my doorstep and the ones far away. I'm lucky to have them and if they're reading this I hope they know that I love the bones of them. I've been pretty shocking lately I know that. I'll get better though, I know I will and when I do then I'll find a way to show them all how grateful I am that they're here right now saving my life, some of them for the second time. There's nothing in life more precious than people you can trust to love you when you're are your worst and I am so lucky that I have the people I do. You're all invaluable to me right now (always) and I will never ever forget this. Thank you. I love you.

Normal service will be resumed from the next post. I just kind of wanted to get something out, perhaps for catharsis and perhaps because this is my blog and I feel like my current train wreck of a life should be acknowledged. I'm not searching for sympathy, but if you want to send fruit gums, I wouldn't say no; the two for £2 offer at Sainsbury's has ended now you see.

Top Ten Books to Make You Cry a Sea of Tears.

Top Ten Tuesday is an excellent weekly Meme hosted over at The Broke and the Bookish – kudos to them for the idea which is pretty much just an excuse to make lots of bookish lists. I love lists.

They have a cute logo and everything but this website is not my friend today and won’t let me insert the image. Annoying.

Soooo, you want to know a worrying thing? I’ma tell you one: It was actually difficult for me to limit this list to just ten books. I wonder if I have a problem. Do I have a problem? Am I really the only person who continues to read books that shatter her heart into millions of tiny pieces? I can’t be, can I? I mean, surely everyone loves a book that rips them apart, right? Look at me, looking for justification like I care: let's be real, I'd be totally continuing with the books that make me sadder than a sad person even if I was the only person alive doing so. I can't help it. If a book is going to make me cry so hard I have Wet Neck then I am always going to be all over it. But I'm fairly sure it isn't just me: those books that get you RIGHT IN THE FEELS, everyone loves to read those books at least once in a while.  I refuse to believe that anything else is true. 

So here, all ready for the next time you find yourself wanting to cry a sea of tears, this is my list of ten books that BROKE ME. (I tried to pick a few that I don’t talk about all the time because a broken record I do not want to be.) 

1. Between Shades of Gray (not to be confused with Fifty Shades of Grey, not now, not ever.) This book, oh man, this book. I’m not over it. I will never be over it.
2. TFiOS Presented without comment.
3. The Cellist of Sarajevo Oh but this book is a good one. It’s kind of incredible. And it hurts.
4. Eleanor & Park So good and hurty and beautiful. My love for this book knows no bounds
5. The Book Thief I didn’t actually cry at The Book Thief but it made my hands hurt (which is a weird thing that happens when I’m intensely emotional: sad, angry, nervous etcetera. I feel any of those things deeply enough and my actual hands actually hurt. I’m a weirdo.) It made my hands hurt and I loved it, so very much
6. A Song for Issy Bradley I read this in an afternoon and felt like I had been broken apart and put carefully back together again. Carys is an incredible talent and this book will make you do the crying thing fo’ sho’
7. The Kite Runner I see the words for you, a thousand times over and I swear my eyes fill up.
8. The Time Traveller’s Wife Everyone cried at this right? It’s not just me?
9. The Siege Why have I not heard more people talking about this book though? My Granny told me to read it and my Granny is never wrong about books. So you know, read it please. Read it and weep like Meatloaf told you to (It’s about the Nazi siege on Leningrad if you wondered and it’s phenomenal.)
10. Love Story Oh MY. We probably shouldn’t talk about this, because talking about it is all it takes to break me.  You don’t even want to know the mess I was in when I actually read it. Don’t look at me. Do not look at me.
    

& that I guess is that. Sometimes you just need a good old cry and sometimes the books that hurt the most are the books you love the most and so I maintain that despite appearances, this list is a very good list. & if it makes you too sad:

(I do so love OITNB)

Throwback Thursday: Josephine’s Book Edition

Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.

It's (Throwback) Thursday! Let’s talk about Ruta Sepetys and Between Shades of Gray.

I read this in the summer of 2011. Ian and I were on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a beach hut style cottage and I started this book on the beach at St Ives and finished in my beach hut bed whilst Ian read a car magazine beside me. I seem to recall we drank wine and ate Maltesers and it would have been so lovely had this book not crushed my soul. I got about three quarters of the way through, said to Ian ‘I think I’m sad,’ and promptly burst into tears. Like, I was actually sobbing. We're talking proper ugly crying here people, the real deal.

The book is about, in a nutshell, Siberian work camps in WWII and it’s really freaking brutal.

It’s also exceptionally well written.

This is WWII like I’d never really seen before, and I hated myself for that. I never really knew that any of this terrible horrible stuff even happened. You just don’t hear about it the same as you do say, the Holocaust, or at least I never had. You think about WWII and you think about Hitler and the mass genocide of the Jews, but this, the millions of people that were killed by Stalin and his men, it’s kind of glossed over. We’d touched on it briefly at school, and I knew Stalin was a total dickwad, but the atrocities portrayed in Between Shades of Gray, (which, fitting title is fitting, as a by the by because this book is all about varying shades of gray - good people doing shitty things and random acts of kindness from total bastards) those atrocities I had little idea about. 

& that ignorance left me feeling disturbed and guilty and somehow humbled. 

That’s the thing I think: that this might be a work of ‘fiction’ but at the same time it’s totally not. It’s not. These things happened. It’s part of our history, and what the hell is there that feels like a sucker-punch in quite the same way as knowing that? That letting people freeze to death in huts they built themselves whilst enjoying a glass of whiskey by a fire is a thing that happened? That it's only one in a too long list of inhuman things that happened to innocent people.

Reading this book made me angry, it made my chest physically hurt – breathing in, filling my lungs, at some points hurt – it broke my heart. Not just the brutality of it either, but the hope; each and every smile made my eyes water, each joke made me want to cry, each tiny act of kindness felt like a knife wound and the love story, Lina and Andrius. Jesus God. I swear. I don’t know if it made me hurt more or less.

Even thinking about it now kind of makes me want to cry a little bit.

And yet. And yet. 

I could not put it down. I swear. I couldn’t stop reading.

Here’s the thing. This book is not a nice book. Bittersweet, that’s the word: it will not fill you with any kind of joy, really (although, that said there are moments that shine like a beacon in the darkness, like the brightest of stars in the night sky)   It will, instead, smash your heart into millions of tiny little pieces.

‘Why the hell,’ I hear you (especially you, Helen. You are particularly loud. I am a mystery to you, I know.) ‘would I want to read a book that's going make me so sad?’

You want to read it because whilst it’s not pretty, it is beautiful. And it will change you. And it matters. You need to read it, you do, because I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that it is phenomenal, but, (and this is very important) you need to read it prepared for what it will make you feel.

Top Ten Books Dealing with Difficult Subjects

This week’s topic for 'Top Ten Tuesday' (yes, I know it's Friday. Whoops.) was ‘Top Ten Books Dealing with Difficult Subjects’ which plays right into my hands actually, because I read rather a lot of books dealing with difficult subjects. I was practically rubbing my hands together because books that are challenging and emotive and punch me right in the feels? Those are the kinds of books I can’t seem to not read.Often I'll be in a bookshop and Helen will call out to me from the other side of the shop, 'hey, Jo, this is a book about Hitler, you'll love it' and I'll be able to feel everybody's eyes on me as I look around cagily and protesting, like some kind of confused Tinkerbelle: I don't love Hitler, I don't, I don't. 

What I do love is being affected by a book. I don't always want to read a book, smile and say 'well, that was good' before moving onto the next one. I like a dystopia that makes me think; I like characters that are raw and funny and human and palpable; and, I like books that break my heart and stay with me for days.

So, have at it. The best of the bunch (today at least):

 Cancer is a difficult subject. Pretty much every person ever has been affected by it to some degree and you can’t get away from the fact that it sucks. The thing I love about John Green – scratch that, one of the things I love about John Green – is that he doesn’t shy away from that. He doesn’t pretend it doesn’t suck.  He doesn’t pretend it’s all going to be ok.  He lets these two very real characters fall crazy in love regardless. It’s a beautiful story, all the more so because it hurts.

 Wasted: This incredible book about Myra Hornbacher’s struggle with eating disorders is the very definition of a book dealing with a difficult situation. It’s raw and hard-hitting, it pulls no punches. It's so brave too. Hornbacher really does bare her soul inside the pages, so it feels.

 

 The Book Thief is one of my favourite books of all time. Set in Nazi Germany, it broke me into tiny pieces. I love it so much I daren’t re-read it.  I have no words.
  

Rape and racial inequality – does it get much more ‘difficult’ than that? This is a book that changes you – it makes you think, really think. The best time I ever had at school was studying this and I’ve read it countless times since. Also, Atticus.

 Aaah, Perks. This is another one of those books that just made me feel so many things. It’s so so so well done.

   

The Cellist of Sarajevo: If you haven’t read this then you should. This story is that of a cellist – based, I believe, on Vedran Smailovic -  who played for 22 days as snipers fought each other in the buildings surrounding him during the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990’s. It will make you bone crushingly sad but it will also fill you with wonder.

This book actually broke my heart. I finished it, looked at Iam, said ‘I think I’m sad’ and then just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It makes me feel cold just thinking about it. Set in 1941 it follows a teenage Lithuanian girl sent to a work camp in Siberia. It’s incredibly moving; it’s incredibly haunting; it hurts and not even remotely in the good way, it just plain hurts. It feels like ripping open a wound, rubbing salt in it and then jumping up and down on it in spiked shoes. How can I recommend it so highly when I describe it so horrifically? Because it matters, because it matters and because whilst your heart breaks into tiny little pieces and you wonder how the hell this can have happened [ and if you’re me how you didn’t really know: we did a lot on the Nazi Concentration Camps in school but barely even touched on this] you’ll also marel at how love and hope can still bloom even when everything else is so hopeless – the love, the hope, the strength, the determination, the joy. That’s what hurts and that’s what makes this book important.

  Wonder is frank and moving and real and so important. Every child, every teenager, every person should probably read this book. This is a book that matters.

  

Junk won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and rightly so. It's the story of teenage runaways who fall into a life of heroin addiction. It's open, honest and upfront - it was slated at the time I think, by critics saying it was encouraging young people to take drugs.  I was a teenager when it eas published and I think it had the opposite effect. Seriously, what Gem and Tar go through, it's not pretty. I think the people that have a problem with books like this really need to have a greater respect for  the target audicence. Drug abuse is a real issue, we shouldn't hide from it and that we need more books like Junk.

  My Sister Lives on the Mantlepiece deals beautifully with loss and what that means, particularly to children. S'good. I think I blogged about it when I read it actually because I thought at the time that it was good at what it did. Children deal with death - grandparents, pets, maybe even a parent or a sibling and it's a hard thing to understand - it's hard for adults so it's got to be a million times harder for children. Books like this definitely have a place. It also handles the topic of racism pretty nicely too.The best thing I think is that it remains accessible: the subject matter is tough but the story itself isn't and that's really important.