SuitabookBack to Blackbrick
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
- Reading
- If Alzheimer’s or family separation is personally relevant, read alongside the child and pause after emotionally intense scenes. Afterwards, discuss how humour, imagination and responsibility shape Cosmo’s response.
- Themes
- Memory, identity and caregiving: Cosmo witnesses his grandfather’s changing memory, personality and behaviour, and looks for a way to help him. The book presents memory loss through the emotional experience of a child and shows the strain placed on relatives and carers.
- Family loyalty and separation: Cosmo lives with his grandparents after his mother leaves for Australia, while outside intervention threatens further separation. The situation places family loyalty and protection at the centre, but the book’s overall judgement on the adults’ decisions is unclear.
- Past and present: A key takes Cosmo to Blackbrick Abbey in the past, where he meets his grandfather as a sixteen-year-old and plans to gather memories. The fantastical journey can be read literally within Cosmo’s experience or as an imaginative way of making sense of events; the author deliberately leaves some questions open.
- Worth knowing
- Consider whether the reader would welcome a book showing memory loss through a child’s eyes. It includes confusion, incontinence, social pressure, sudden fury, bereavement and the fear of family separation.