Michael Rosen's Sad Book

renee badenoch

One of my favorite genres of books is books about grieving and death for children. These are books that I wish I had had as a child, and books I have discovered as an adult that have given me profound solace in times of grief. 

I resonated with much of Michael Rosen's The Sad Book, a book about the profound loss he felt after the death of his son Eddie. The opening page is an image of a man brightly smiling and it says, "This is me being sad. Maybe you think I'm happy n this picture. Really I'm sad but pretending I'm happy" That line, and many others, hit me right in the heart. 

I think there's much that children struggling with grief would find comforting about this book, particularly if they feel alone in the enormity of grief, and the feelings of loneliness and anger that might surround it. However, there was an uncomfortable feeling I had at times while reading the book that felt like it could be read as if this is how one ought to or should feel when grieving. Some of the book moves from the personal to the general in a way that projects feelings onto the reader. 

One line that I think was meant to be silly came across as too vague and a bit ominous, "Sometimes because I'm sad I do bad things. I can't tell you what they are. They're too bad. And it's not fair to the cat" My overactive imagination pictured some truly terrible things there, and I feel like as a child I would have squirmed with anxiety over that line! 

Another line, talking about a poem Rosen wrote about grief says, "This last bit means that I don't want to be here. I just want to disappear." It's hard for me not to interpret this as suicide (due to my own struggles since childhood with depression). I think it's good to have frank discussions about those feelings, and yet it still gave me a bit of discomfort to have it as a small line that's brought up but not done much with. Not saying it's wrong, but it's a heavy enough feeling that it's hard to read it mentioned so briefly. 

I can't state enough how much I loved Quentin Blake's illustration in this book. While his loose, carefree style of drawing normally gives his work a sense of lightness and whimsy, here it can seem blurry, unfocused, chaotic, confused, much in the way of grief. When Rosen writes about sweet memories as a way of reconciling grief, Blake's illustrations turn soft, and tender.

Michael Rosen's Sad Book

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