The world is not static it moves, and is dynamically interconnected.Īt the shore Sascha watches a thrown yellow frisbee and a white volleyball. White stones on the ground connect to the white stone we see in the great mountain in the distance. On another page the small white images are stars, and then also flowers, so we can make this connection of synchronicity across domains. What is a bone and how does it change into something else? The paintings on each page are deliberately darker so you can find these lighter contrasting images to talk about. There's a white bone in the grave you can connect this to other white images throughout the book. For instance, at the burial, Sascha leaves yellow flowers on the grave in the background, her brother runs after a butterfly of the same color. That's the key image in that painting, of course, and Becker does a similar highlighting of lighter details on subsequent pages, too. The cover has Sascha holding a gold or yellow stone in her hand. I would use it beginning with middle grades, maybe. It feels more like an all-ages picture book, for reading and talking about with kids.

So this is cool, right, but not by any means 'easy,' which is also what I like about it, but I think a lot of people won't like it for younger kids. It's about how the stone got to the shoreline all the way across time, evolving from other purposes, including other memorials, though in different forms, beginning in Babylon 600 BCE (and yes, on the endpapers you get a map of the travels of the stone in various forms). Sascha eventually chooses a stone she finds for that purpose, but the tale that brings us to that point becomes less about the dog and her relationship to it than connecting her private, personal loss to a cycle of events over centuries. This book is in part about grief, and the need to memorialize a life. But it is lovely, complex, and digitally illustrated by the author of the popular and also wordless Journey trilogy. I don't think younger kids would know a fraction of what this book was really about without adult help. The library where I got this labels it 'easy' because it is a picture book, but I pretty strongly disagree. Sascha's vacation will be different without her pet dog, who is buried at the outset of this wordless tale, which will reward you through multiple readings.

Aaron becker books