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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Charlotte Moundlic is the art director at Pere Castor and the author of several French books for young readers. She lives in Paris.
Olivier Tallec graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliques Duperre in Paris and worked in advertising as a graphic designer before devoting himself to illustration. His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines, and he has illustrated more than sixty books for children. Olivier Tallec lives in Paris.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 3-This book about loss and grief is all honesty, and the story is very much from a child's egocentric perspective. A boy is angry when his mother tells him that she is going away forever, and he yells at her that she shouldn't have had a kid if she were going to leave. When she dies, he worries that she never taught his father how to make toast properly. He feels the loss deeply but cannot put it into philosophical terms. He tries to capture his mother's smell by keeping the windows closed in the hot summer weather and thinks that by scraping his knee he will hear her voice saying, "It's just a scratch, my little man." When his grandmother points out that his mother will always be with him in his heart, he likes to run so he can feel his heart beating and know she is with him. One morning he wakes to find that his scrape has scabbed over and healed, much like his grief. The artwork, primarily red, focuses on the child throughout as he works through his feelings. The last page is particularly soothing as he puts his hand over his heart, feels it beating, and lets it lull him to sleep. This is an important addition to the canon of books on death for young children, showing beautifully how a child interprets the loss he is experiencing but has trouble naming. Libraries will want to have this title on hand for those children who need it.-Joan Kindig, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Moundlic's English-language debut opens at an exquisitely painful moment; the boy narrator's father tells him that his terminally ill mother has died overnight. Moundlic captures the raw, unmanageable feelings that sweep over the boy: rage ("?'Well, good riddance!' I yelled to Dad. I couldn't believe she'd left us"), melancholy ("I'm trying not to forget what Mom smells like"), and an especially moving concern for his newly widowed father ("He won't be able to manage without her"). As the boy struggles to master his feelings, his grief collides with his father's and his grandmother's. A scrape on his knee recalls his mother's consoling voice ("It's just a scratch, my little man"); as it starts to heal, the boy does, too. Both Moundlic and Tallec leaven sadness with humor, Moundlic in words ("?'It's me!' I shout... which is dumb, since Dad knows that we're the only two here") and Tallec (the Big Wolf and Little Wolf books) with lighthearted, impishly sketched artwork. An invaluable resource for adults who need to understand what grief means to a child-and perhaps for a grieving child, as a roadmap through it. Ages 5-up. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This is not a book for everyone, but it could be an important one for those in need. From the opening line Mom died this morning. it's clear that this is going to be a hard book to get through, and it is, with the unnamed little boy struggling with wild fluctuations of emotion: anger at being left behind; sympathy for his grieving dad; and panic about forgetting his mother, which he tries to counteract by closing all the windows, holding his breath, and running around until his heart pounds, since he was told that she'll always be in your heart. A scrape on his knee provides the most salient metaphor a wound he wishes to keep fresh so as to continue hearing his mother's consoling voice, until, without him realizing it, one day it turns into a scar. This is a tough book: Moundlic's text is unsentimental and Tallec's illustrations are heavily predominated by the color red, which gives the affair a somewhat alarming feel. But it's honest, and in such situations that matters most.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
