Books to Help Kids with Loss and Grief
When a kid asks where someone went, these books don't rush to fix that feeling or explain it away. Some sit quietly in the sadness, others find a garden or a dog running free, so you can pick what matches the loss your kid is actually facing.
A gentle picture of what heaven holds for dogs — endless fields to run in, fluffy clouds for sleeping, and biscuits no dog can resist.
Short and plain-spoken, Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs by Tomie dePaola says goodbye without ever making the loss bigger than a four-year-old can hold.
The garden gets torn up before it gets rebuilt. The Rough Patch by Brian Lies lets anger be part of grief, not just tears.
Written for the moment you have no idea what to say, I Can't Believe They're Gone: A kid's grief book by Karen Brough hands you the words instead.
Beyond the Ridge by Paul Goble follows a spirit up and over the ridge instead of down into the ground, a rare direction for a death story.
A girl named Yaffa grows up in a Polish town full of family and light, learning photography in her grandmother's studio — until Nazi soldiers destroy her community, and she spends her life recovering the town's lost photographs to build a lasting tribute.
Based on one real family's flight, Lost Words: An Armenian Story of Survival and Hope by Leila Boukarim, Sona Avedikian gives a nearly unknown history a small boy's eyes to see it through.
Oliver and his human are both eighty. Memoirs of a Tortoise by Devin Scillian makes loss feel like the slow end of a long, matched friendship.
A young girl must flee her family's home in Dehradun during the Partition of India, leaving behind her beloved doll Gurya in the rush to catch a train to safety.
Two children upset about being apart from their mother learn that everyone who loves each other is connected by an Invisible String made of love, one that stretches any distance and never breaks.
After their father dies, six-year-old Marvel, her seven siblings, and their mother move into a run-down tar-paper shack deep in the Wisconsin woods and slowly turn it into a home.
After his cat Barney dies, a young boy sets out to name ten good things about him for the funeral, but can only think of nine — until a talk with his father helps him find the tenth.
A four-year-old boy and his Japanese American family are forced from their California home into incarceration camps during World War II, moving through three different sites over three years while his parents work to keep the family safe.
Grief here looks like a heart literally sealed away in a bottle. The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers makes an abstract feeling something a kid can actually see.
This is loss with no funeral and no goodbye, just a mother sent across a border. Until Someone Listens: A Story About Borders, Family, and One Girl's Mission by Estela Juarez names that particular kind of missing.
