“I didn’t know / best friends could die” is the stark opening of award-winning author Renée Watson’s latest novel-in-verse, All the Blues in the Sky. Narrator Sage is still raw and reeling from the death of her best friend (whose name isn’t revealed until late in the novel) after a hit-and-run car accident on Sage’s 13th birthday. The after-school grief group Sage attends offers moments of shared understanding but also envy and resentment—Sage feels a gulf between her own sudden, heartrending loss and the experiences of other students who were able to say goodbye to terminally ill loved ones over weeks or months.
In the pages that follow, the novel offers a blend of Sage’s memories of her friend, her longing for a different reality where her friend still lives, and her painful feelings of guilt. Watson takes her readers through various stages of grief, showing that the process is messy, ugly and far from linear—especially when another impending loss compounds Sage’s sorrow.
Throughout, Watson employs vivid imagery to convey Sage’s complicated emotions in ways both lyrical and concrete: “Tiny flowers blooming out of the planter outside a brownstone, showing off their beauty. / And across the street, a pile of garbage bags holding rotting things.” Watson doesn’t hold back in depicting the wrenching heartache of a beloved life lost too soon, but she also brings her young readers to a powerful realization: that although loss is inevitable, we can all do our best to love as well and fiercely as we can, for as long as we can.
