My friend, Loonie /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A gentle story of connection and loss finds a promise in memories after a young child loses her constant companion.

With a good friend like Loonie the yellow balloon, anything is possible. From neighborhood walks to reading aloud in bed to dance parties in your room, Loonie makes each activity a little brighter, a little fuller of sunshine. But as one child discovers with sadness, when it's time for Loonie to float away home, the sunshine goes, too. It's not as fun to have a dance party alone. And while tending to the garden helps a little bit, the world outside the window is silent and gray. Until, one day, as flowers start to push up from the soil, big and full of hope, the memory of Loonie begins to emerge in unexpected places. With tender empathy, and charming and whimsical art by Ashling Lindsay, Printz Award winner Nina LaCour illuminates the childhood companions that bring a little magic to the world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A big, bright yellow balloon represents beats of friendship and mourning in LaCour's tender, well-paced tale. From the moment a girl's parents, a queer- presenting couple, bring the balloon home, "Loonie" floats easily into her heart and daily routines: "She set a place for Loonie at the dinner table and made sure Loonie saw all the pages of their bedtime story." The child loves the bobbing object, dancing with it and taking it on walks until Loonie breaks away, growing "smaller and smaller in the sky." The girl's parents invite her to channel her sadness into gardening, which soon bears colorful fruit that brings warm memories of Loonie flooding back, along with a new joy at seeing "yellow in places she'd never noticed before." The pages capture the very real emotional weight that children can attach to inanimate objects in this gentle introduction to loss. The family is portrayed with light skin. Ages 4--8. (Mar.)

Booklist Review

A little girl becomes attached to a special large, yellow balloon, proclaiming it "my friend, Loonie." In the tradition of invisible companions, Loonie sits at the dinner table and hears a bedtime story along with the girl. Everything is more fun with Loonie--singing, dancing, and even neighborhood walks--until the inevitable happens, with the girl losing her hold on the string and Loonie floating away. Her parents (called only "parents" but depicted, perhaps, as two moms) try to distract her with gardening, but the girl is inconsolable. Lonely, gray days pass, until eventually the girl notices that one of the flowers her family planted is blooming. Its yellow blossoms remind her of Loonie! When she is able to think of Loonie with happy memories, she begins to notice its bright yellow color in the world around her. Mixed-media illustrations employ changing tones to emphasize the girl's feelings. While the loss of a balloon may seem trivial to some people experiencing grief, the story expresses emotion in a way that children may recognize and understand.

Kirkus Book Review

Loss is loss, no matter how buoyant the friend. When her parents come home one day with a gloriously gargantuan yellow balloon, their little girl knows instantly that she has found a friend. Over the next few days, she and Loonie (as she names the balloon) do almost everything together: go for walks, observe the squirrels, and dance. All is well until the girl invites her friend to see the garden but neglects to hold onto its string. Her grief is acknowledged and understood by her parents, who help her plant seeds in the ground. But slowly she sees other yellow things, like the flowers she planted, and is able to remember the good times the two had together. By the tale's end, her happiness comes from that remembering--a well-conveyed message that will resonate with readers confronting similar situations. Lindsay's bold, smudgy art makes clever use of color--yellow is a motif throughout, from the signifying brightness of Loonie to the little girl's clothing and other objects in their vicinity. At the end, parents are warned of the dangers of uninflated balloons around small children and the perils they can pose to wildlife. The little girl's parents present as female; all are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.) Respect for children's sadness and loss is exemplified beautifully in this tactful take on grief and its recovery. (Picture book. 4-7) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Nina LaCour is the best-selling and Michael L. Printz Award-winning author of several young adult novels, including We Are Okay , Hold Still , The Disenchantments , and Everything Leads to You , as well as a novel for adults, Yerba Buena . She is also the author of Mama and Mommy and Me in the Middle , illustrated by Kaylani Juanita. Her books have won many awards and have been translated into several languages. Nina LaCour lives with her wife and their daughter in San Francisco.

Ashling Lindsay is the illustrator of several books for children, including The Night Box by Louise Greig, which was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal, and The Tide by Clare Helen Welsh, a Crystal Kite Award winner. She is also the illustrator of an Alan Turing biography for the best-selling series Little People, Big Dreams. Ashling Lindsay lives in Belfast, Ireland.