When Someone Dies
Greenlee, who counsels grieving children through what the publisher calls writing therapy, here offers bibliotherapy to bereaved young readers. Her plotless book adopts the second-person perspective to express a variety of reactions to death and mourning ("If the person that sic died was very important to you, you get to worrying that all the other important people might leave too") and to offer consolation ("I've never heard of it happening that way, but it's hard not to think about it"). The author's attempts to ape children's speech tend toward the coy ("So, whether you're a kid or a tall person") and Drath's rather banal watercolors are unnecessarily limiting in that all the people shown are white and all the settings rural. On the whole, however, Greenlee's words will prove familiar and comforting: "People don't go away like this on purpose, or even set out to make you mad. That's just what happens . . . when someone dies." Ages 8-12.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.