Mockingbird
Have you ever lost someone you loved? The school shooting changed everything in Caitlin's life, and it will never be the same without Caitlin’s older brother Devon.
Mockingbird is a book about a 5th grade girl with a disease that makes some things harder to understand for her, and she has to learn to live life without her older brother Devon that dies in a school shooting. Her dad calls this day “The Day Our Lives Fall Apart” and is really depressed, so Caitlin has no one to help her understand what's going on.
Caitlin relies on her dictionary and her drawings to help her express feeling and show emotions. One day on the news, the anchor woman says that it will be difficult for the whole community to find closure. So Caitlin goes straight to her dictionary to look up closure, she soon finds out that closure means “the act or process of closing something”. She now knows that she needs to find closure in order to find happiness and make her life and the community's life better.
On the way of finding closure Caitlin meets Michael, a kindergarten, and learns his mom also died in the same school shooting that Devon died in. When Devon was still alive he helped Caitlin understand things that she didn’t get and he was Caitlins best friend. Caitlin knows that Devon was an Eagle Scout and that was his passion and he wanted to get to the next ranking really badly but in order to do that he has to finish a project. Unfortunately Devon dies before he can finish his project. Caitlin is absolutely sure that this will find them closure if they finish it. Caitlin study’s and workers herself to a dangerous point of trying to do this to find closure and she wants to share what she finds with the rest of the community, now she just needs to get her dad on board to help fix and finish the project.
This is a great book that tells a sad starting story at the beginning and then a feel good at the end, showing people how to make things happy again. I would recommend this book to people in 5th grade and older.