The Heart and the Bottle is a very short story with a very big message. Highly recommended for child therapists, children, parents, and anyone who’s recently or long ago suffered the still painful loss of a loved one or knows someone who has. This is a very smart and a very touching book. I love it when authors of children’s books do this! Nice touch to have a photo of the author-illustrator as a young boy in the author bio section on the inside back cover of the book. They’re colorful and sweet and interesting and many are very intricate, except for the also sweet, meaningful, simple drawings on the inside front cover. And then on the inside last page I loved how some parts of the cardiovascular system are shown and listed. I got a kick out of how the heart was drawn to more resemble a real human heart than a typical heart symbol. I appreciated how the paper pages are thicker than in most books and sturdy, but this is not a board book. There is a perfect amount of text and of pictures. 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.
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