A Ball for Daisy

Daisy, a small white dog, loves her red ball more than anything else in her world, carrying it everywhere and clearly treating it as her closest possession. At the park, another dog plays too roughly with it and pops it flat, and Chris Raschka spends several wordless pages simply on Daisy's grief afterward, her posture slumped, her energy gone, in a way that treats a child's loss of a favorite toy as genuinely serious rather than something to brush past. Later, the same dog that popped the ball returns with a new one, a blue ball this time, and offers it to Daisy, restoring her happiness and letting the story end on friendship winning out over the earlier carelessness.

Raschka paints the entire book in loose watercolor, gouache, and ink, with broad, visibly spontaneous brushstrokes that look almost unrevised, closer to a quick sketch than a polished illustration, which suits a story this small in scale and this direct about feeling. There is no text at all, so a reader narrates the story themselves from Daisy's expressions and body language alone, and its short length and single, clear emotional arc make it especially suited to toddlers working through a loss of their own, a broken toy, a missing blanket, for the first time. At thirty two pages, it moves quickly enough for a single sitting with a very young child, and because neither dog is ever named beyond Daisy herself, a reader can narrate the other dog's motives however they like, careless at first, then generous, without the book insisting on one reading over another.