She told me, “I read it already, actually. “But how am I going to write the blog post if you don’t? She said, “I’m still not going to read it.” Today I told her, “I’m writing a blog post about you reading The Dead Bird.” And dying! Come on, you’re going to like it.” A red-letter day-we’d brought The Dead Bird Home. “Do you think nobody has picked it up,” said Harriet, “because nobody would ever, ever want to read it?”īut I pooh-poohed her. “A brand new copy of The Dead Bird, and nobody else has picked it up yet.

Two weeks later, we were at the library and I saw The Dead Bird on the new releases shelf. She said, “No dead bird.” And she seemed kind of immoveable, so I didn’t want to push it. The illustrations are beautiful-by the award-winning illustrator of Last Stop On Market Street- and normalizing death is healthy and wasn’t there a dead bird in Sidewalk Flowers by Jon-Arno Lawson and Sydney Smith? And everybody liked that book. “So we’re getting The Dead Bird,” I told her. And even though the book doesn’t address the question of death coming for children, or young parents-would we put the kettle on for the reaper then? Though if someone wrote that book, I’d probably make Harriet read it too. Even though the children appear to left without a guardian. She was still annoyed about a recent book I’d read her in which the Grim Reaper comes to tea and takes away the children’s grandmother, and everybody understands and feels good about the whole thing. She said, “I don’t want to read books about dead things.” “Only because it’s a reissued book by a literary icon that dares to confront uncomfortable issues of mortality.” “Why would I want to read a book about a dead bird?” “Should we get,” I proposed to Harriet, “ The Fox and the Star, by Coralie Bickford-Smith, or The Dead Bird, by Margaret Wise Brown.” I was emphatically waving the latter in the air. We were at the bookstore a few weeks ago, and I couldn’t narrow down my selection of picture books. How to Terrorize Your Child with Margaret Wise Brown

The dead bird by margaret wise brown