Jackie Azúa Kramer: Hi, my name is Jackie Azúa Kramer, and I'm the author of The Boy and the Gorilla. What inspired me to create this book? My daughter, for many years, babysat for these two adorable, lovely little girls, and, in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast very badly. And unfortunately, their father was one of the many lives lost during that time. I had worked as a school counselor and now I was writing picture books, and I thought, "How do I translate my experience as a counselor into a picture book," which is a totally different narrative format. But I still was thinking about the same questions. How does a child communicate grief? How do they cope with the loss of a loved one? How does one open a discussion around the questions of death? What's the effect on the family? And ultimately can the family begin to grieve together in healthy way?

The hardest part of writing this, there were certain interactions between them. So for example, I literally sobbed at my keyboard when the boy climbs to the top of a tree to find his mom and the gorilla follows him and she's not there, and I couldn't help but imagine my own kids searching and wanting so much for me to be there and not finding me.

What surprised me while I was writing the story? How easily the conversation between the boy and the gorilla happened. Once I had the gorilla come to life, that thing in the room, that 800-pound problem that no one was talking about, I had the gorilla just follow this little boy in his day-to-day activities like having breakfast and going to school. And in those moments, the boy would have questions. So, for example, at one point, he's at the park, at the playground with his dad, and he asks the gorilla after he sees all these kids with their moms around, "Can't my mom come back home?" And the gorilla says, "No, but she's always with you."