Two years ago, Maine children’s author/illustrator Charlotte Agell published “Maybe Tomorrow?”, a picture book that gently and movingly deals with the grieving process. It is a must read for any young child dealing with loss. In The Season of Desire, Anica Mrose Rissi, who grew up on Deer Island, does something similar for slightly older and more sophisticated readers. The result is equally compelling as we watch a fifth-grade girl navigate the depths of pain and loss, at first with despair and then gradually to healing.

Four months ago, eleven-year-old Lily lost her twin brother Anders to a short and shocking illness. Now, as school ends and summer begins, she and her mother are still reeling from his death. Her mother barely gets out of bed, and Lily sleepwalks through life, numb and angry. The only thing that keeps her grounded – if that’s the right word – are her daily meetings with Anders, which take place at the tire swing behind the barn. This place, which they call the Overlap, is the small (and smaller) space where her world and his meet.

Is Anders really there? Or did Lily just conjure it up as a way to deal with the intense pain of missing him? Rissi never really says and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how Anders’ presence allows Lily the gift of time – which she didn’t have during his illness – to work through saying goodbye to him, to remember all the things she- she loved him, to savor the extraordinary closeness of their twin. bond and process their pain. (In a wonderfully subtle twist, Rissi also uses their time together to show us how the dying process works: As the Overlay shrinks, we see Anders gradually detach from the real world.)

No one but Anders can do that for Lily. Her mother (a single mother) is emotionally unavailable, her best friend has proven worse than useless, and she feels like a “radioactive freak” at school. One of the things Rissi captures perfectly is this sense of alienation that is unique to grieving children: adults can usually count on other adults to empathize; fifth graders (understandably) have no idea how to treat each other.

She also explains why this loss for Lily is so intense: the twin bond is stronger than any other, perhaps even the mother-child bond: “Lily wasn’t Lily without him.” It’s more than just sharing “Us Things” without words—loving the smell of books, needing Fluffernutter sandwiches to be cut into diamond shapes, giggling at the word plumber. They are actually part of each other: “She missed him as she would miss her arm.”

If all this sounds bleak, it’s not – for two reasons. First, Rissi balances all the sadness with humor. Her characters – especially the children – love puns and have a wicked sense of humor. Their books are always funny and fun to read for any age.

The other source of delight is the way the beauty of Maine’s natural world pervades the entire book. Rissi dedicated this book to Deer Isle, and her love for the place and its people shines through in practically every paragraph. She fills the story with wonderful minor characters and never misses a chance to boast in the landscape, the changing seasons, and the rugged beauty. She conveys all this, not in long lyrical passages (which any young reader would skip), but in the everyday lives of the characters who spend their time picking berries, making jokes about the smell of clams under Deer Bridge Isle or making cravings. seaweed leaves on the shore. “The salt-pine-granite air,” Lily knows, “was as much a part of who she was as her kidneys.”

Rissi’s only misstep comes in a few passages where he tries to enhance some of the wild animals with human attributes, such as speech, or switches the point of view to, say, a bird or a fox. Maybe he wanted to add a level of fantasy to the story, but the effect is shocking.

Lily spends most of the book desperately trying to keep Anders from leaving her a second time as Overlap shrinks. But gradually, and with his encouragement, she makes new friends, helps their mother out of her cocoon of sadness, and is finally able – in a truly touching scene – to make him truly sad. The story moves quickly, with short chapters, crisp, colorful prose, and snappy, believable dialogue. Rissi’s book is by turns profound, witty, heartbreaking and moving. There’s a little something in The Season of Wishes for every reader, not just the grieving.

Amy MacDonald is a children’s book author living in Portland and Vinalhaven. She can be reached at [email protected].

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