Bad Bye, Good Bye by Deborah Underwood illustrated by Jonathan Bean

 

There is so little text in this book (which sadly is long out of print) that you and your young reading companion will need to pour over the illustrations and along the way you are are also sure to have a terrific discussion about just what is going on here as we watch the family pack up their old home, the moving truck is loaded and the family and their dog drive off down the highway. It is such a long journey filled with emotions - bad at the beginning as the young child is so upset about having to move and wonderful at the end as he finds a new friend and a promise of happy days to come. The journey is also a long one - we see the family have to stop at a motel and spend the night. Luckily on this very hot day, the motel has a wonderful cool swimming pool. So this is a book about change and moving house and the ups and downs of life.

In only the briefest of rhyming couplets, Underwood paints a clear picture of the fear of moving and the emotional upheaval for children.  In their long drive though, the mood shifts to one of possibilities rather than grief.  Even the journey itself is a form of coping and healing that makes the happy ending feel like a natural result of the entire process. Waking Brain Cells

This is a useful depiction of a family’s physical move, but the strength is in the emotional journey that’s expressed with a raw honesty. Kirkus

Here is some of the text:

Bad day

Bad box

Bad mop

Bad blocks

Take a minute to click this link and read this full review by Betsy Bird from the School Library Journal:

Every day someone somewhere packs up all their worldly possessions, their pets, and their miserable offspring and heads for a whole new life. It’s daunting. You can’t help but admire their guts. And boy, you’d sure like to hand them a book that they could use to show their kids that as scary as a move like that can be, ultimately it’s going to be okay. Enter a book so sparse and spare you’d never believe it capable of the depth of feeling within its pages. School Library Journal

I also have a Pinterest of Picture books about moving to a new house or moving a new country. The perfect book companion would be:

I talked about another books about houses illustrated by Jonathan Bean in a previous post:

Building our House

I picked up Bad Bye, Good Bye because I do love books by Deborah Undewood:

The Quiet Book

Finding Kindness

Outside In