What is a parent to do if Harry or Ron dies?
It's bad enough that J.K. Rowling is expected to kill off two characters in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." What makes this a double whammy of grief for some readers is that the death will be proof that there are no more Harry Potter books.
"Sure, readers knew all along this would be the last book, but for children that's just so much information," says psychologist Chris Thurber of Exeter, N.H. "The death, the death -- that will make it concrete."
Some children won't be able to tease out that it's the series' end as much if not more than the death that makes them sad, says Heather Servaty-Seib , a child bereavement specialist at Purdue University.
Psychiatrist David Jones of MIT advises parents to read the book as quickly as their children do. "If a child says, 'Why did he/she have to die?' saying, 'I don't know, I haven't read the book,' is a bad answer," he says.
Fan websites offer plot summaries of all the books, and he expects the new one will be up by midday Sunday. "You need to be informed so you can help your child find meaning in whosever death it is," Jones says.
It is, of course, just a book, and that's a fine thing to remind your reader. But sadness for a fictional character is very real to children, and they need help processing it. "What will be most troublesome to explain is if the character dies in a random act of violence rather than in some meaningful way," Jones says.
This isn't about protecting children from the story or rescuing them from their feelings, however.
"Parents are sometimes concerned that the portrayal of death in a book will be traumatic. Books are ways for children to work out symbolically their responses to the significant issues of reality: life and death, good and bad, love and hate," child psychiatrist Elizabeth Berger writes in an e-mail.
Children who have strong reactions may be connecting the death to a past personal loss or to a potential future one.
"We can't think like kids," says Servaty-Seib. "You need to ask a lot of questions to know how they are putting the pieces together." Because so many deaths in this series are violent, her biggest concern is that a child could conclude that all death occurs because of murder or violence. "That's important to clarify," she says.
It's also OK for a child not to be distressed. "That isn't an abnormal reaction or an unfeeling child," she says.
At Camp Songadeewin of Keewaydin , a girls camp in Vermont, unit leader Erica Harlow is expecting as many as 27 teary readers on her hands.
"I'm planning discussion groups," she says. " 'If you've finished chapters 1 to 10, come discuss!' It's OK to let them be sad. It's not OK to let them be sad and to not understand why." 