The year before my mother died, we gathered sky memories. It began one day when I saw a car from Montana with "Big Sky" on the license plate.
"Is the sky bigger in Montana?" I asked my mother.
"Hmm," she said, thinking. "It's probably that they have fewer hills and buildings, so you can see more of it. But our sky is wonderful, too."
"It looks pretty regular to me," I said, looking up at it. "What's so wonderful about it?"
"It's wonderful because it's always changing. Sometimes it's beautiful-wonderful and sometimes it's scary-wonderful and sometimes, like now, it's just regular-wonderful."
I wasn't convinced.
"Grade 3-6 - A small, slim book with a big heart and worthy aspirations. Emily is just 10-years-old when her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Like a scrapbook of photos, the story captures the 10 months from the discovery of the disease to the woman's death. Each period is remembered by a vivid sky portrait shared by Emily and her mother. ... The author is honest about the stages of illness and physical reactions to chemotherapy, but never overwhelms readers with too much detail. Brisson wrote this easy-to-read novel with the hope that it would be useful to terminally ill mothers trying to prepare their children for their impending death. It should serve that purpose quite well." - School Library Journal
"Emily learns about love and survival from a very special mother who helps her prepare for what's about to come. This is an important, much-needed book about a young girl's experience with mother loss. It will make you cry but for all the right reasons." - Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters
ISBN 0-385-32606-8