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Best Children’s Book Ever On Life And Loss

"Cry, Heart, But Never Break," is an imaginative and beautifully rendered meditation on death for kids

Mar 8, 2016

Written by well-known Danish children’s book author Glenn Ringtved and illustrated by Charlotte Pardi, Cry, Heart, But Never Break is an imaginative, meditative tale inspired by Ringtved’s own experience of his mother’s dying and his struggle to explain it to his young children, writes Maria Popova.

“Cry, Heart, but never break,” was his mother’s way of of telling her grandchildren that “the profound sadness of loss is to be allowed rather than resisted, then folded into the wholeness of life, which continues to unfold,” says Popova. And thanks to Pardi’s illustration, we see how even Death himself looks choked up, brimming with “some indiscernible fusion of resignation and recompense.”