Kate, first introduced in the bestselling What's Heaven?
, struggles to understand her grandfather's symptoms of Alzheimer's in this third collaboration from Shriver and Speidel. Here journalist Shriver not only uses the narrative to model a potentially prickly conversation between parent and child (as she did with What's Wrong with Timmy?
) but also conveys a challenging conversation in which Kate tells her friends of her grandfather's condition (to explain why she wants to spend Sunday with him instead of them). Speidel's soft pastel portraits reinforce the loving ties among family members. Shriver's succinct explanation of the condition ("It's a disease of the brain that some people get when they're older. It affects Grandpa's memory and makes him confused, irritated, and often angry because he's struggling to remember things he just did," Kate's mother tells her daughter), the examples of conversations that could easily be emulated by adults and children, as well as Kate's loving project (undertaken with her grandfather) to put together a photo album to preserve her grandfather's memories and to help him remember family and friends, make this a book that will appeal to an audience across generations. Ages 6-9. (May)
