Falling ― A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back

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 desires 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.

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 includeA Year in New York and the memoir Crawling: A Father's First Year. He lives with his family in New York City.