“Yesterday, my mom was still alive.” During the night, a little boy’s terminally ill mother has died. Over the course of the coming days, the boy is filled with anger, sadness, and questions. “I know very well that dying means that you’re never going to come back ... How will Dad know how to make my toast the way I like it, cut in half with the honey in a zigzag?” He’s worried about forgetting his mom, he’s worried about taking care of his dad, and he’s worried his Grandma will think he’s crazy after he cries and screams when she opens the windows he closed for fear his mother’s smell would disappear. “She’s there,” his grandma tells him, “in your heart, and she’s not going anywhere.” A skinned knee that starts to heal provides an understandable metaphor in Charlotte Moundlic’s raw, honest look at a child’s grief. Illustrator Olivier Tallec’s illustrations are spare, tender, and full of feeling. (Ages 4–8)

A little boy responds to his mother's death in a genuine, deeply moving story leavened by glimmers of humor and captivating illustrations.

When the boy in this story wakes to find that his mother has died, he is overwhelmed with sadness, anger, and fear that he will forget her. He shuts all the windows to keep in his mother's familiar smell and scratches open the cut on his knee to remember her comforting voice. He doesn't know how to speak to his dad anymore, and when Grandma visits and throws open the windows, it's more than the boy can take--until his grandmother shows him another way to feel that his mom's love is near. With tenderness, touches of humor, and unflinching emotional truth, Charlotte Moundlic captures the loneliness of grief through the eyes of a child, rendered with sympathy and charm in Olivier Tallec's expressive illustrations.