A Stone for Sascha

A girl grieves the loss of her dog in an achingly beautiful wordless epic from the Caldecott Honor–winning creator of Journey.

This year’s summer vacation will be very different for a young girl and her family without Sascha, the beloved family dog, along for the ride. But a wistful walk along the beach to gather cool, polished stones becomes a brilliant turning point in the girl’s grief. There, at the edge of a vast ocean beneath an infinite sky, she uncovers, alongside the reader, a profound and joyous truth. In his first picture book following the conclusion of his best-selling Journey trilogy, Aaron Becker achieves a tremendous feat, connecting the private, personal loss of one child to a cycle spanning millennia — and delivering a stunningly layered tale that demands to be pored over again and again.

Aaron Becker learned while living in Granada, Spain, that many of the city's stone churches had at one point been mosques and, before that, Roman ruins. Which got him thinking: What wisdom can something as still as a rock share with the rest of us? While he could only guess at the answer, he does have some experience with these ancient fragments of earth. After all, the house where he grew up in Baltimore was built from, you guessed it, stone. Aaron Becker lives in western Massachusetts.