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A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back
by Elisha Cooper
The award-winning children's book author confronts a new world when faced with his daughter's illness in this frank, moving, and beautiful memoir.
Elisha Cooper spends his mornings writing and illustrating children's books, his afternoons playing with his two daughters. The phrase he hates most is "throw like a girl," so he teaches them to climb trees and play ball. But when he discovers a lump in five-year-old Zoë's midsection as she sits on his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, everything changes. Surgery, sleepless nights, treatments, a drumbeat of worry. Even as the family moves to New York and Zoë starts kindergarten, they must navigate a new normal: school and soccer games and hot chocolates in cafés regularly interrupted by anxious visits to the hospital. And Elisha is forced to balance his desire to be a protective parent- even as he encourages his girls to take risks - against the increasing helplessness he feels for his child's well-being, and his own. With the observant eye of an artist and remarkable humor, Elisha writes about what it took for him and his wife to preserve a sense of normalcy and joy in their daughters' lives; how the family emerged from this experience profoundly changed, but healed and whole; how we are all transformed by the fear and hope we feel for those we love.
"Starred Review. A profoundly moving memoir." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Zoë is on the mend, and post-treatment scans show no recurrence, yet Cooper still struggles to reconcile the fierce love he feels for his daughter, his need to protect her, and the powerlessness he feels in the face of cancer. This tale of fatherly devotion is also a story of discovering what it means to survive in the face of the unknowable." - Publishers Weekly
"As delicate yet plainspoken as his beautiful picture books, Elisha Cooper's Falling sketches out, in moving detail, a father's ultimate ordeal, from the time his young daughter is diagnosed with cancer through the long purgatory of waiting to find out if she will be cured. It's also a wonderful and often comic account of raising kids amid the quirky vexations and comforts of life in New York City." - Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning author of Three Junes
"Falling is the picture of a man helpless to help a sick child. Cooper's fear and powerlessness turn into a range of emotions, but ultimately, Falling is about love. This is a book I will never forget. I recommend it to everyone." - Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life
This information about Falling was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elisha Cooper is the author of Train, Farm, Homer, and, most recently, 8: An Animal Alphabet. His children's book, Beach, won the 2006 Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Dance! was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. Other books include A Year in New York and the memoir Crawling: A Father's First Year. He lives with his family in New York City.
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