The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers

I came close to crying, but this overall this is an uplifting book that also made me smile. It’s also a great bibliotherapy book for children who are grieving. It would make a wonderful present for children who’ve lost a loved one, or someone of any age who’s suffered a loss, both recently and long ago. This is the best picture book about complicated grief I’ve ever read, and one of the best books about it on the subject, period. I love the artwork of Oliver Jeffers, with lots of contemplative space and lovely watercolors and slightly elongated depictions of people. And I like the reciprocity of support suggested here: Grandpas help kids, kids help adults. Will kids get it? Oh, I think so, with some talk with adults (which is in a way one of the very things the book is about, reading and talking together with kids), to help them make sense of the unspeakable things we all face from time to time. So this is a metaphor or analogy for the grieving life, and a lovely simple and sweet one. One day she meets a young girl, though, who helps her remove that heart from the bottle. This doesn't make her life easier finally, as one might imagine. Her grandpa is gone, and since she feels like she can't risk too much strain on her heart again, the girl grows up solitary, putting her heart in a bottle which she wears tied to a string around her neck.

Yes, it's that subtle, the chair is just empty, no explanation, really. A little girl likes to read with her grandfather as he sits in his rocking chair, and then one day she faces an empty chair. While the subject of loss always has the potential to unsettle young readers, most should find this quietly powerful treatment of grief moving. In the final spread, as she sits reading in her father's chair, a thought balloon exploding with childlike and cerebral images alike makes it clear that she is once again at peace.

Conversations between the girl and her father appear as balloons with images in them instead of words his answers to her enthusiastic “questions” about the world are expressed in scientific prints and diagrams. ) artwork is the sweetness in this bittersweet story. All the bubbly curiosity that had made her sparkle disappears, “but at least her heart was safe.” Not until the girl, now considerably older, meets “someone smaller and still curious about the world” is her heart restored to her. When a small girl loses her father, her only parent (Jeffers represents the loss with the father's empty chair in a moonlit room), she decides “the best thing” is to put her heart in a bottle and hang it around her neck.

The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers