Writing About Love & Loss For Children

My middle-grade book The Children of Castle Rock (Faber 2018) traces the grief of the main protagonist, Alice, as she mourns the death of her mother. The book opens as she prepares to leave her family home forever. Rather than linger on Alice’s emotions, I choose to focus on her refusal to leave without taking her mother’s commemorative rosebush, which is dug up and squished into the car. The rosebush then reappears periodically – on a balcony, as a watercolour and eventually in a new garden – in a way which shows the reader without spelling it out that Alice, without forgetting, is nevertheless learning to move on. 

As I wrote the story, I asked myself these questions: What has Alice lost? What does she want? What does she need? These are the questions which drive the plot. Alice has lost her mum, her dad is completely unreliable and her home is sold. She needs to rebuild a sense of family, she wants her dad to do this for her but she needs to understand that he never will. These are the questions which give the novel emotional depth and a sense of purpose. They are not what make it an exciting read, though. The excitement comes from the fact that, in her pursuit of these needs, Alice runs away from boarding school, camps on a Scottish beach, almost drowns, breaks into a house and gets chased onto a stack of rocks by a bunch of Italian gangsters, where she gets cut off by the tide … and in the end conquers both her fear of losing her dad and her fear of heights by abseiling down a cliff. 

Even as I write this, I’m aware how complex this question of responsibility is. It is absolutely not about watering down difficult subjects, but it’s about rendering them in such a way that a child can explore them – as Pullman writes in the quote I cited earlier – in safety. Children, like all readers, will take what they can and what they need from a story. A child who has experienced severe loss will be alive to Alice’s grief. A child with less experience of loss may simply enjoy the adventure. The story may lead to greater understanding; it may simply entertain. All forms of reading are valid. 

In The Children of Castle Rock, as in all my other books, I have tried to acknowledge that bad things do happen, that the people you love are not always reliable, but that there are others who love you if you can open your eyes and heart to them. I have also tried to fulfil my other responsibility as a writer, which is to make my story as cohesive, exciting and as good as I possibly can. But there my task as a writer is finished. Alice’s story is in the world, to be completed in as many ways as there are readers. Which is just as it should be.
 

Natasha Farrant is a writer and literary scout. Her books include the Costa winning Voyage of the Sparrowhawk (Faber 2020), The Children of Castle Rock (Faber 2018), Eight Princesses and a Magic Mirror (Zephyr 2019), The Girl who Talked to Trees (Zephyr 2021) as well as The Things We Did for Love (2012) and four titles in her popular children’s series The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby: After Iris (2013), Flora in Love (2014), All About Pumpkin (2015) and Time for Jas (2016), all published by Faber & Faber. Her latest book is The Rescue of Ravenwood (Faber 2023). For more information visit www.natashafarrant.com, and follow her on Twitter @NatashaFarrant1.