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Masur's book is a work for the lay public that is sorely needed and that adeptly fills the need for a resource regarding coping with death in children and adolescents. The book is written in a personal, engaging, and especially coherent manner, making it an easy-to-read volume for parents at what is likely the most vulnerable-making aspect of their lives. Her ability to discriminate among a variety of kinds of death and loss is both the work's greatest strength and subtle weakness. Her chapter on different stages of grief as a function of the child's age is quite brilliant and, as a stand-alone chapter, should be required reading in any graduate-level course on infancy and early childhood. She then provides a compendium of discussions on the effects of loss and grieving across an enormously wide variety of losses (parents, siblings, even pets). Here, her work is not as in-depth as one would like and seems to lean heavily on the breadth as opposed to the depth of coverage of each of these losses. What in particular is missing is a thorough discussion of the role cognitive development plays in grief, and how the different levels of grief are profoundly affected by one's level of cognition. Her next section deals with different manners of loss (e.g., divorce, illness, violence). Her articulation of these various losses has not yet been written about in my experience and this on its own makes the book an important contribution to the field. She also distinguishes between a definitive loss and an ambiguous one, the latter occurring when the loss is real but death itself is not present (coping with a grandparent with Alzheimer's and its confusing impact on a child is an especially poignant example).
The book is obviously a labor of love on the part of the author, who repeatedly describes her own maladaptive family's inability to deal with the loss of her father and her wish that she did not have to carry the burden of this loss on her own for much of her childhood and earl