A picture can tell nearly an entire story. This book opens with Sarah wearing the white dress with angel sleeves that her Grandma made her, as the sun beams through the window at her — a scene that under other circumstances might be full of joy. But Sarah's uptilted face, exquisitely rendered by illustrator Tonya Engel, carries a pure, poignant heartbreak. We learn why on the next page, when she combs her own hair because "Grandma is busy and Grandpa is gone."
Sarah's unalloyed sadness over Grandpa's death is tempered by their garden's abundance, an image upon which he often drew:
The earth changes.
Like us, it lives, it grows.
Like us, some part of it never dies.
Everything and everyone goes on and on.
It is one thing to hear these words when a beloved companion is still with you and quite another thing to remember them after they're gone. The book, for children ages four to eight, follows Sarah's transformation as she receives the attention she needs from friends and family members who comfort her and who understand when she tries to speak and tears flow instead. Surrounded by love and encouraged to remember her Grandpa, Sarah finds her way toward a genuine experience of the part of life that never dies.
Jacqueline Woodson has received numerous honors and awards for her many books. She was given the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, the St. Katharine Drexel Award, the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature and the Hans Christian Anderson Award. She served as the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. From 2018–2019 she was the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. In 2020 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellow. Among her many New York Times bestsellers is Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and an NAACP Image Award. Here's a wonderful TED talk with her, about the value of slow reading and what it taught her about writing.
