#BOOKREVIEW #6
CHILDREN’S BOOK REVIEW AS A WRITER AND A READER

Title: Goodbye, Mr. Muffin
Author: Ulf Nilsson, Swedish author
Illustrator: Anna-Clara Tidholm
Genre: Children’s Picture Book
Target Audience: 3-7 years old

How to make sense of death? Time and age can teach you to accept the loss. But, for a child, understanding death is difficult.

I was in my teens when a collegemate got hit by a car on a road next to my university. I heard the news from my friends. No teacher spoke to us to help us in processing the loss. The friends of that girl were given some counselling help, but nothing beyond that. Even after three decades, the memory of that accident and the fear in the voices of my friends is still fresh in me. Only if, my teachers or parents had spoken to me and supported me in accepting that terrible accident. Or, a book like Goodbye, Mr. Muffin (Adjö, Herr Muffin) would have helped me to reduce the intensity of that trauma.

Children often have a million swirling questions and deep confusion related to death. Questions like, what is death? Where does the person go after death? Why does someone die?

While explaining death to a 3-year-old is difficult, talking to a child about loss feels overwhelming. Ulf Nilsson, through his book Goodbye, Mr. Muffin has explained the dying process and kept the explanation simple. ‘All day Mr. Muffin sits in his house, in a lot of pain’ is one of the ways to prepare the child that when we grow old our body hurts and we feel sick.

He has treated the process of life and death with sensitivity. The book is relevant for children who have lost a family member, friend or pet. In his bio, Ulf mentioned that he picks up the theme for his stories from his experience. This story of Mr. Muffin’s death could be either based on a loss he suffered as a child, or someone in his family struggled in dealing with a similar situation.

I can’t say if writing on this topic was easy for Ulf but he has managed to put the readers at ease with this tough subject. He has shown parallels with the life cycle of human beings by using a guinea pig as a character. This kind of metaphor—using a guinea pig to mirror the human life cycle—is the mark of a truly thoughtful storyteller.

‘Once, Mr. Muffin was married to a lady guinea pig…Together they had six fluffy little children.’ This is one of the ways to let the young readers connect the incidents shared in the book through their own eyes.

I haven’t read many books on death but I can say that Ulf has captured the perfect emotions of grief and loss. He has used the art of show but not tell immensely well in this book. As I kept flipping the pages, I could find parallels between the end stage of a human being with the life of a guinea pig. He showed that Mr. Muffin had a good life with his wife and six children. He was succinct in breaking the process of the final rights of burial and expressing that death isn’t bad at all. The sentence – ‘Everyone dies – you, me and daddy. Maybe you get to meet your mother and your wife?- is an example for that.

Ulf is trying to comfort the dying guinea pig while helping the reader to make peace with loss. The letters written to the little animal by the owner (the daughter) serve as a tender and expressive outlet for grief. Maybe, Daddy gifted Mr. Muffin to his daughter as a pet because she keeps referring to him in every letter to communicate with the guinea pig.

If you are struggling with finding the right words or sentences to talk to a kid about loss then those letters would help you a lot as they soothe the heart of anyone dealing with loss.

Books like Goodbye, Mr. Muffin don’t erase pain, but they help us speak the unspeakable—and that’s where healing begins.

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