A tender middle-grade novel about grief, friendship, and learning to live with unanswered questions.
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Summary
“Grief is like hunger. Just because you eat today, doesn’t mean you won’t need to eat tomorrow. … Grief is like hunger. Grief is not something you get over. Everyday it will show up. Everyday I will have to tend to it.”
It’s Sage’s 13th birthday. And her best friend dies on her way to her house to celebrate. All the Blues in the Sky is a book about navigating grief as a child. Sage attends a grief group after school with 4 other girls who have all experienced death and loss. The book explores grief, anger, confusion, guilt, friendship, joy, understanding, and compassion. In the Author’s Note, Watson explains how COVID and the collective grief we experienced inspired this story. The world keeps on turning even when we lose someone. Days on the calendar continue to get crossed off. And death doesn’t not wait for a “best time”.
Review
This book was very healing for me. It was very special to experience Sage’s story of grief as an adult who is in the first year of grieving the sudden and unexpected death of my father. I share in her feelings of “why” and how anything is supposed to happen now that our loved one is gone. Just like Sage, I crave those tidy answers surrounding why and how. But as Sage learns in her Fly Girls future pilots club, there are some things that even science can’t explain. There are somethings with “incomplete explanations”. This was very healing for me. To hear it. And to hear it in the context of a young girl’s experience of death makes it more pure, more tender.
There is a definite trigger warning for death of a loved one. In the grief group there is a girl who lost her brother to police brutality, a girl who lost her twin sister to cancer, another who sat by her grandmother’s bed for months as she approached death, and Sage who lost her best friend when a drunk driver hit her with his car in a hit and run. Approach with caution and an open heart.
I listened to All the Blues in the Sky with my 12 year old son, who is also grieving the loss of his grandfather. He loved the metaphors with math and in the Fly Girls aviation club. He said he hadn’t read many books that talked about death like this one and he really appreciated the story.
🎧 I listed to the audio book on Spotify. It was only 2 hours and 15 minutes long and easy to listen to in one sitting. The actor had a good cadence and pleasant voice. I enjoyed it very much!
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