I could not finish their book. I could tell everything was too perfect in the beginning. Then when the little boy is hit and killed by the car I was done. I read until after his funeral and then I quit.

A sweet and simple story about friendship, grief and moving on. This would make an excellent read aloud in 3rd or 4th grade!

Matylda, Bright and Tender is a book you can't put down and won't soon forget. I was immediately drawn into the relationship between Guy and Sussy and hoped for that type of friendship for my own children. The story was heart warming and heart breaking at the same time. I will certainly be passing this book on to my readers.

I've read a number of books for children or young adults in recent years about a death in that child's life. Perhaps it was a friend of a young adult, or the loss of a parent or a sibling. Yet one of the few in my memory of the loss of a young friend is Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. More recently, there is also The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin.
Here then, in 2017 comes Matylda Bright & Tender, a debut novel by Holly M. McGhee, that tells another story of a young girl, Sussy, and the terrible loss of her friend, Guy. We may not think that the middle grades need to know of such tragedy, yet in Holly's story also lie the universal feelings that people of all ages feel in their grief.

And who is Matylda? She is a leopard gecko, a new pet that lives with Sussy, but chosen as a living creature both Guy and Sussy will share and love. Matylda with a "y" that's her very own name also receives her own origin story according to Guy, a loving friend with a big imagination. Between him and Sussy, plans are made of how to care for this new and amazing pet, and stories of her previous "warrior" status are created, too.
On what was to be a fun trip for new kinds of food for Matylda, a terrible accident occurs, and Sussy is left, without Guy, without her life's guide. Suddenly, the book's story is no longer about this friendship's hilarious fun, but about Sussy's grief in caring for Matylda the way Guy would have wished. Sussy goes through numerous trials and travels perilous paths to cling to the lizard in the hope that Matylda likes her because Guy is no longer there. There are secrets kept by Sussy, alarming deeds done, but more than anything, Guy is ever present in Sussy's thoughts.
Parents might be shocked at the times their children don't tell their feelings, and while Sussy's parents try to support, when they look at Sussy with the hope that she'll soon "get over it", Sussy knows she must pretend. Time and Sussy's thinking about the kindnesses given her, by Guy "before" and by the pet store owner, other friends, and her parents help her know finally that she's going to be okay.
One of the best things that Holly's story shows is that grief is complicated and everyone is different. There is one late scene in the book where Sussy and her dad share a bit of happiness at good news. Dad says, "Paper tigers. Thank goodness for paper tigers." Sussy asked what that is, and Dad answers: "Things you worry about that end up being harmless." It's a part I'm glad that children who read Matylda might latch onto, might keep for helping them when needed. If you read this with your child, or with students, good conversations will happen, and they will happen because this topic is opened, not hidden as it is so often.

Interview: Holly M. McGhee explores grief in Matylda, Bright and Tender

During the summer of 2012, Holly M. McGhee started writing a book about two friends who adopt a leopard gecko together. Twenty-pages in, however, she put the book down. It was a full year before she would return to what became Matylda, Bright and Tender.

When Holly realized the 9-year-old girl at the center of the book was going to lose her friend, she couldn’t stand it. “That’s when I began to understand that the book was about surviving, how things can change in an instant, and I knew it was about my own survival too, having been in a terrible and fatal collision as a teenager,” Holly told Cracking the Cover.

“I wanted to reach out to kids who might be suffering, whose parents don’t know what to say to them, I wanted to let them know they’ll be okay somehow, that in time they’ll fold what happened to them into themselves, that they don’t have to fight it, that it will become part of who they are and they’ll be bigger for it. I hope my readers figure this out faster than I did.”

At the center of Matylda, Bright and Tender are Sussy and Guy. Guy’s name is actually that of Holly’s own imaginary friend — Guy Hose — through nursery school.

“As my imaginary friend,” Holly said, “Guy always represented the darker side of me — he did all the bad things I wished I could do, and I think that’s what is so special about Sussy and Guy — they ‘see’ each other fully, both the dark and light sides, which means they can love each other fully as well. It’s the ultimate friendship.”

Sussy and Guy’s friendship gave Holly freedom to write, because Holly knew that no matter what, the duo would remain committed to each other. “Their relationship rolls from love to anger to hate and back to love again and they became fuller and deeper people in that process,” Holly said. “With that core of unconditional acceptance I (as the writer) could do anything with them, just as we can with our real and true friends.”

When Sussy and Guy convince Sussy’s parents that they need a pet — something to love that’s all their own — it’s a leopard gecko, aka Matylda, that takes up residence in Sussy’s room. A leopard gecko wasn’t originally part of Holly’s plan. Then real life changed things. It was during the year that she put down Matylda, Bright and Tender that Holly’s son got her family’s first leopard gecko, Speedy.

“I didn’t expect to fall so madly in love with this gecko,” Holly said. “There was a week that summer when I was the only one home, and I was responsible for Speedy … and I had to catch the crickets and feed him. I was terrified but I wanted to take good care of him … so I did, and I got to know him pretty well … when I sat back down to work on Matylda, the gecko showed up to claim a spot.”

All books go through multiple stages in which the length changes, chapters get rewritten and moved around, and characters develop. The biggest emotional shift in Matylda, Bright and Tender came from a question author Kathi Appelt asked Holly.

“In the funeral scene, Sussy promises Guy that she’ll love Matylda enough for them both,” Holly said. “Kathi asked me what was at stake for Sussy in that promise. I considered her question for quite some time, until it became clear Sussy thought keeping the promise meant she could hold on to Guy, even in death. It was a powerful question and the answer reverberates throughout the novel. I am forever grateful to Kathi. She is one of the most generous humans I know.”

Matylda, Bright and Tender is Holly’s first middle-grade novel — she’s written a number of chapter and picture books under the pen name Hallie Durand.

Writing Matylda, Bright and Tender was a different experience because Holly was willing to make herself and her readers uncomfortable in order to tell the truth about grief. “More importantly I had the privilege of holding my readers close as I told Sussy’s story,” she said, “so that hopefully they come away knowing they can survive whatever life has in store — this is what grief feels like and you can go on, just like Sussy does. The emotional stakes were higher for me with this one.”

Holly is currently working on four projects in various stages of completion. Come with Me is a picture book with long-time friend and artist Pascal Lemaitre. It was born from the duo’s mutual experience of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the lockdown in Brussels last spring. Come with Me goes on sale Sept. 5. Pascal and Holly are tinkering with another idea, and Holly’s got a few pages of a middle-grade novel. “It’s the first time I’ve had the title of a book before the story,” she said “Maybe that’s a good omen…”

Small book with a huge powerful punch! It is smart, funny, heartbreaking, heartwarming, informative, and sensitive in dealing with issues of friendship, death, and responsibility.
I liked Sussy's interaction with Matylda throughout the story and how she really helped her get through the death of her friend.

I liked this story of Sussy and how she copes with the loss of her best friend. I think this will be a great title to have in my library collection especially to help young children grieve and cope with loss.

In this very sad book, Sussy and her best friend Guy get a gecko from the pet shop that is kept at Sussy's house because Guy's mother says there is not room for a pet at his house. Then, while they are on a bicycle trip to the pet store, Guy is hit by a car and killed. For the rest of the story, Sussy struggles to deal with the death of her best friend and tries to keep Matylda,the gecko alive and well.

Sussy (short for Susquehanna) Reed and Guy Hose have been inseparable best friends since that day in Kindergarten when he showed her how to make a never-ending Mr. Potato Head. The two friends have done everything together ever since - with one exception. They have never been allowed to have a pet.

Now in fourth grade, Sussy and Guy manage to talk Mr. Reed into letting them get Guy's choice of a leopard gecko. They find the perfect one at Total Pets, a gecko that seems to have been as immediately attracted to Guy as he was to her. And he thinks she should be called Matylda "of the Ancient Face and Starfish Toes."

Although Matylda lives in a tank on top of Sussy's dresser, she seems to like Guy so much more than Sussy, much to Sussy's dismay. The friends even give Matylda a warrior history, in which she is victorious in battle and her master grants her one wish - to be loved, a wish that is granted when Sussy and Guy find her in Total Pets.

Then one morning, Guy decides Matylda needs some vitamin D3. The two friends hop on their bikes and start riding, when a dog runs out and goes after Sussy on her bike. Guy gets off his bike to yell at the dog just as a car is coming down the street. Next thing Sussy knows is that her best friend is dead.

After the funeral, Sussy suddenly finds herself alone for the first time since Kindergarten. She begins to obsessively focus on Matylda, trying to figure out how to love Matylda the way Guy had, believing that if she does everything right, she could hold on to Guy.

When summer comes, Sussy isolates in her bedroom, every day dressing in the same red capri pants and sunflower shirt she wore the day of the accident, reliving it over and over and over. The only time she leaves the house is to go to Total Pets to buy something for Matylda, something that she hopes will convince Matylda that she loves her just like Guy had, and that will make Matylda love Sussy just as she had loved Guy, enabling Sussy to continue to hold on to him.

At Total Pets, she finds herself stealing food and toys for Matylda, egged on by the stealing girl's voice in her head. As each thing fails to do what she wants, Sussy returns to the store more frequently, until she realizes the store clerk, who had always been so friendly and helpful, is on to her and Sussy's world, as carefully constructed as the never-ending Potato Heads, comes flying apart. But it was a world constructed by Guy, and now, Sussy must find a way to construct her own world without him.

Sussy and Matylda are the central characters here, and both are believable. Sussy's first person narrative feels natural and realistic as she tries to navigate her new life without Guy while still not letting go of him. Her story is interspersed with memories of the two friends, giving the reader a real sense of what their friendship was like. As Sussy recalls more and more about Guy, the reader begins to realize that this was an uneven though dear relationship, with Sussy frequently letting Guy take the lead and acquiescing to his ideas - like insisting that they must get the vitamin D3 for Matylda.

The other characters, including Sussy's parents, Guy's mother, Mike from Total Pets are satellite characters, secondary to Sussy's struggle, much of which is experienced in her thoughts. These other characters don't need to be fleshed out, but they are needed to be there for support and love, which they all do well.

McGhee has written Sussy's grieving process with a mixture of anger, confusion, guilt, and magic thinking. Sussy begins to find herself so very tired from have to go on without Guy, suddenly not really knowing how to do things by herself. The world has lost all its color, and Sussy experiences everything around her as grey. It doesn't take long for her to endow Matylda with thoughts and feelings that a gecko is just not capable of having. The fact that Matylda would rest on the back of Guy's neck probably has more to do with hiding and warmth than with the love Sussy thinks the gecko has for him.

Matylda, Bright & Tender masterfully explores the very sad, very poignant grieving process of a child, and while Sussy's pain is palpable, McGhee has infused her story enough humor so that it doesn't overwhelm the reader. Sussy's story does end on a note of hope and new friends who will help her move on and discover who she is without Guy.

Matylda, Bright & Tender is a well-done, heartwarming, tender story, and one not to be missed.

This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was sent to me by the publisher, Candlewick Press

4.5 stars on my blog because one of the two things the MC did at the end of the story was pretty serious and she was given zero consequences for it. Compared to the other thing she did, which did not physically harm anything, it seemed to be kind of sloughed off by everyone, including her, as not as egregious. I would recommend either reading this book with your Middle Grade aged reader, or reading it before they do so you can discuss the story. There were some pretty heavy themes in this book.

That being said... the story elements are wonderful. The book deals not only with loss and grief, but also grieving anger and self-destructive behaviors, and healing. It also shows how pets can help with the grieving and healing process.

As a Middle Grade the story will grasp and hold the intended audience's attention, and I feel they will have no trouble connecting with the character on many levels. The characterizations of the children were realistic.

Did not meet the needs of my collection at this time.