The novel shows how death can feel incomprehensible and overwhelming to adults, let alone to children and young people, who are still developing cognitively and finding their place in the world. In general, literature has played a role in helping children to understand death and grief. Through witnessing characters navigate the challenges of losing a loved one, children may feel less isolated in their own experiences of loss, and can learn important coping and grieving skills.

Picture books on bereavement, designed to be read to young children, deal with the deaths of parents, grandparents, friends, and pets. Children’s counselor Pat Thomas wrote I Miss You: A First Look at Death (2000) to describe the loss of a beloved family member; it explores what death is and what a funeral is, as well as unpacking some of the big and overwhelming emotions which people experience during these times. Hans Wilhelm’s I’ll Always Love You (1985) describes the death of the young narrator’s dog, Elfie.

Bereavement literature also includes middle grades books, such as Barbara Park’s Mick Harte was Here (1995), which (as discussed in this guide) deals with 13-year-old Phoebe’s loss of her brother. In Counting by 7s (2013) by Holly Goldberg Sloan, 12-year-old Willow loses both of her adoptive parents.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) is a young adult novel; it features a nine-year-old protagonist whose father died in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center Towers. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) traces the love story of two teenagers who have terminal cancer.