All the Blues in the Sky

Thirteen year old Sage is grieving her best friend, who died in a hit and run on Sage's own birthday, and this novel in verse follows the months after, as Sage moves through a support group for grieving teenagers and measures her own loss against the different kinds of grief the other kids in the group carry. Watson lets Sage's anger come first and stay ugly for a while rather than smoothing it into something more comfortable to read, and the book tracks small, specific moments, a song that used to be a joke between Sage and her friend, an empty seat at a lunch table, a birthday that will now always mean the anniversary of a death, rather than building toward one clean turning point. The support group gives Sage other teenagers to measure her grief against without ever suggesting one person's loss outweighs another's, and the book closes with Sage further along than she was, not healed exactly but able to carry what happened without it being the only thing she is.

Watson writes in a mix of prose and free verse, so the book's form shifts with Sage's own state of mind, tighter and more fragmented when her grief is rawest, more expansive as she starts to process it. It suits readers old enough to sit with a friend's sudden death without a book softening it for them, and its value as something to hand a grieving reader directly, not only as a story to read from the outside, is part of what reviewers have praised.