BOOK REVIEW
The House In Ollie’s Tummy
by Larissa Reinboth
Reviewer
Dr. Levita D’Souza
Lecturer and Counselling Psychologist, Faculty of Education, Monash University.
The story follows Ollie, a boy whose little sister Millie is stillborn, as he navigates a new emotion that has unexpectedly moved into his tummy - grief. The book takes the reader through Ollie’s experience of grief and further explores how other members in Ollie’s family experience and cope with their grief. Grief is personified as a character, who express its needs to Ollie.
As grief feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable at the beginning, Ollie attempts to ignore and deny it. However, as the family befriends and makes room for grief, it engages them by voicing its needs. The emotion feels physically and emotionally different for every character, and throughout the book they each find a way to work with and through this feeling by “listening” to its needs.
Through humanizing grief and allowing it to talk to its characters through the body, the book empathizes and normalizes the felt experience of grief. As such, when read in conjunction with a trusted adult, the book is suited to bereaved children from 3-7 years but can but can be adapted for older children.
In addition to cuing children to explore where in their body an emotion seems to be localised and how it feels there (Ollie’s Grief is variably described as at times “bouncing around his tummy like a trapped frog”, “sitting in Ollie’s throat” or else feeling “hot”, “bubbly” or “dark”), the book uses a simple visual metaphor to help illustrate Grief as a physical character living inside a person’s body.
This metaphor could help children conceptualise their own experience of this confusing emotion and aid them in relating to their parents’ behaviours as a result of Grief’s presence and actions inside their bodies.
Of note is that the book introduces the reader to the notion of rituals following death, and acknowledges that different cultures can grieve differently.
Resources and Activities
The book also offers imaginative and practical extension activities throughout by suggesting creative activities related to the narrative which the reader might like to try out. These prompts are helpfully highlighted in yellow bubbles and include grief management activities involving arts & crafts as well as other potential processing methods.
Imaginatively, the book is instrumentalising its associated website, www.thehouseinolliestummy.org to let readers access further support resources. These include downloadable PDF files with instructions for kids’ grief activities, and a form that lets readers give feedback on their experience of using the book with children.
For parents and other caregivers navigating this experience with bereaved children, the book provides a four-page resource section at the end. The resources include information about the cognitive abilities of children from toddlerhood to early childhood to process the concept of death. It also provides behavioural indicators that commonly manifest in bereaved in children.
The Audience
This book is not only suited for parents and caregivers but may be used by other professionals as an adjunct to therapy when working with bereaved children.
Finally, practical strategies are provided which will enable the reader to explain the concept of death and manage ensuing emotions with the ultimate goal to help the young person integrate grief into their lives.
Expert Discussion Panel
The book is co-authored by Dr Korie Leigh, a Transpersonal Psychologist and Professor of Thanatology in Santa Fe, USA, and Larissa Reinboth, the Founder and Director of Possum Portraits. The book promises to be a valuable tool for parents and caregivers to help children navigate feelings of grief following sibling bereavement due miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death.
“The House in Ollie’s Tummy” is published by Possum Portraits, a charity established to commemorate perinatal loss through the use of visual keepsakes. The book is due to be published on 1st October 2024.
About the author: Larissa Reinboth
The first children's book Larissa ever wrote was called "The Little Apple". It was a collection of folded A4 pages with spelling mistakes and coloured pencil drawings. She was 6 years old. With "The House in Ollie's Tummy" Larissa makes her debut as a children's picture book author and illustrator, writing from the heart about an issue she encounters in her work every day: perinatal bereavement.