By Todd Parr
Tackles: Death
Age Range: 3-8 years
Genre: Picture Book
The Goodbye Book explores feelings that come along with death and loss. Todd Parr’s classic illustrations accompany many of the feelings that come with loss such as being sad, mad, confused, remembering happy times, and experiencing things like not wanting to sleep or eat, wanting to express your feelings through art, and many more.
This book has simple words and animations, and is very bright, in typical Parr style. Rather than focusing on explaining death, what it is or what happens after, Parr simply focuses on how children may feel, normalizing their experiences and reminding them to focus on the happy memories, and know that they are loved.
The use of colorful animations, basic stick figures and animals makes the book more inclusive of race and gender so that everyone can relate. I think this book can be very effective when explaining to children the emotions that they may feel and giving reassurance, and I recommend this being used in conjunction with a book that explains more in depth about what death is and answers more in depth questions.
7 out of 10 fish bowls
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