Lolo's Light
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
For readers who love The Thing About Jellyfish and Counting By 7s, Lolo's Light is a deeply honest middle grade novel about grief, redemption, and life as a kid facing both.
This is a truth about growing up: Once in your life, sometime after your first memory but before you can drive a car, something is going to happen to you that doesn't happen to anyone else you know. It might be something good. It might be something bad, or special, or funny, or shocking. For Millie, it's something really sad. Lolo, her neighbors' infant daughter, dies unexpectedly, suddenly, inexplicably, on the night Millie babysits.
It's not Millie's fault. There's nothing she could have done. And there's nothing she can do now.
So how does she go on?
She does what you'll do. She finds her way.
This poignant and profound coming-of-age story portrays a tragic experience of responsibility and its poisonous flip side: guilt. Emotional and important, this is an honest and empathetic portrait of a girl at her most vulnerable—a mess of grief, love, and ultimately, acceptance—who must reckon with those most difficult of demons: death . . . and life.
A GREAT WAY TO UNDERSTAND DIFFICULT FEELINGS: Coming to terms with one's responsibility for things both our fault and not is a universal experience that can be difficult to process, particularly when grief is involved. Millie offers a great blueprint for young readers who don't understand the surrounding emotions and need help working through them.
A MAIN CHARACTER KIDS WILL LOVE: Millie makes mistakes as she navigates grief. It's often not pretty, but it is very relatable. The author's honest portrayal of this experience will resonate with young readers, whether grieving or not.
Perfect for:
Middle grade readers
Educators and librarians
Parents looking for books on loss or grief
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Garton (The Great Good Summer) treats the topic of grief with wisdom and tenderness in this slice-of-life novel set on the North Shore of Chicago. Everything seems to go fine on the evening that 12-year-old Millie Donally babysits for the very first time, but she learns the next morning that sometime during the night, her four-month-old charge, Lolo Acosta, died from sudden infant death syndrome. No one blames Millie for the baby's death, but the rising seventh grader, who attends comedy camp and practices improv, nevertheless feels guilty and soon experiences depression. Her only comfort is a warm, yellow light burning continuously in Lolo's window. When Millie reads about bioluminescence, "light that is both produced and emitted by a living organism," she starts to wonder if the glow means that Lolo is partially "still here, on Earth." The memory of the light's warmth helps Millie get through a school chicken-hatching project that requires her to carefully tend fertilized eggs. Divided into tonally discrete "before" and "everything after" sections that convey the tween's transformation, the narrative economically and movingly renders Millie's inner turmoil—and work with a therapist—in the wake of a sorrowful event. Characters default to white. Ages 10–up.
