2026 Newbery winner, All the Blues in the Sky by Renée Watson is a first-person verse novel about a girl named Sage whose best friend is killed in a car accident on the way to Sage’s 13th birthday party. The novel explores Sage’s early days of grief, a school-assigned grief group, and the nature of friendship and loss. It’s a very honest but still fairly gentle novel that captures the feelings of a grieving middle schooler (or really someone of any age) well.
Loved: I thought that the use of free verse poetry worked really well for this topic. The book was short (most free verse novels are), but somehow managed to convey the feeling of how grief can feel long, hard, and unending, while still moving the reader through Sage’s experience at a pace quick enough that the book never dragged.
Interesting: The book used a lot of powerful metaphors–Sage’s love of flying and her love of math–to help the author explore middle school relationship dynamics and the nature of love and grief. The diagrams and the use of handwritten text were well done. I especially thought that waiting to have the narrator, Sage, use her best friend’s name until nearly the end of the book was really powerful. And the page with her best friend’s name written over and over was a unique way of capturing what tween girls so often do in doodling something over and over again.
Limitations: I wouldn’t say this was a limitation, but obviously, a book about the death of a best friend and a grief group has a lot of hard and sad things in it that some readers are going to be ready for at different ages. For example, in Sage’s grief group, there is one person who has a relative who was shot by the police. The story is set in an urban area. Sage is black (I’m assuming her best friend is Latina, although that is not explicitly stated), and the book gently tackles issues of race and police violence. It is a lot less raw and harsh than books like The Hate You Give (an excellent book, but definitely one for older readers). But I would say, you probably want to be ready to talk about death and injustice if you are going to read this book.
Other Newberies:
Of course, a main character dealing with the death is a very common theme in Newbery winning novels!
The other Newbery that directly deals with the death of a best friend is Bridge to Terabithia. But many other Newberies help readers grapple with death of a loved one. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (1998) and The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (2015) were also free verse novels that have the death of a family member as a major theme.
Prose Newbery winners that also center on the death of a loved one include Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata (2005), The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (2013) Sounder by William H. Armstrong (1970), Missing May by Cynthia Rylant (1993), Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech (1995), When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller (2021), and The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera (2022).
I would guess that half the Newberies have the main character who in some way deals with death.
What it teaches me as a writer.
I thought that the ending of this book (and I’m a big fan of solid endings!) was deftly handled. On the one hand, this book is about the realities of grief, and to have it end with all hope would seem a little out of sync with the tone of the book. On the other hand, middle-grade novels need to end with some hope. Also, because we as the reader do not get to know the best friend before she dies, we do not experience grief over losing a character, as we do in books like Bridge to Terabithia. So Sage’s grief is something we are rooting for her to overcome, and by the end of the book, we want to see movement. So (spoilers ahead!) having the ending be that Sage is going to have to grieve another death, but this time a death with a long goodbye of a terminal illness, but she knows more what to expect, seemed like a solid ending choice. (Especially since Sage was so angry with the members of her grief group who had the “privilege” of saying goodbye slowly to dying loved ones compared to the sudden, violent death of her friend who was hit by a speeding car at an intercession.)
Have you read All the Blues in the Sky? What are your favorite time free verse novels?