A Request

Park Slope, Brooklyn

I would like to read a book in which nobody dies.

This whole week I've been trying to claw my way out from under a pile of reading. So many textbook chapers, so much children's fiction... and when the reading is done there are math problems. My first formal math problem in 17 years. Oh lordy.

The books for my children's literature class are actually making me look forward to the peace and stability of the math problems. In the selected readings, the body count is so high. In the first book it was a mother and a best friend who died. In the second book, a mother and adoptive mother died plus a bunch of other family memebers who were once swept away in a mudslide. In the book I finished this morning, the novel started and ended with funerals. There was a father, a village woman, a baby, a baby brother, a whole family, several goats, a peddler, a donkey, and then an adoptive sister and baby brother who all died.

Enough.

Something happy please. Something appropriate for 3-8 graders in which nobody dies please.