Falling

Starred review from May 9, 2016
Children’s book author Cooper (Train) takes the grimmest of subject matters—learning that your young daughter has cancer—and turns it into a poignant but never melodramatic musing on parenting, love, and risks in this slim memoir that packs a mighty punch. The lives of Cooper and his wife, Elise, suddenly shift into warp speed when Cooper feels a lump on four-year-old Zoë’s side when she’s sitting on his lap during a Cubs game. It’s a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms’s tumor, a so-called “good cancer.” But after surgery, the doctors tell Cooper and Elise that Zoë’s is stage three. Twenty-two weeks of chemo follow, during which the stoic Zoë bonds with nurses, stuffed tiger clutched in her hand, while Cooper spins in a silent rage that bursts forth at inopportune moments. Cooper, Elise, Zoë, and youngest daughter Mia move from Chicago to New York and develop a ritual around Zoë, now in kindergarten, going for treatment every Friday. Cooper tells of the blanket of normalcy that descends, but still, “every week has a Friday.” 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.

Starred review from April 15, 2016
The children's book author shows masterful control in this memoir of a life careening beyond his control.This is a sequel of sorts to Crawling: A Father's First Year (2006), but it's also a very different book. As Cooper writes of that book, "it's short and upbeat, though there's one sentence about not wanting to become the parent of a child with cancer that makes me suck in my breath." In this short memoir, the author has become exactly what he didn't want to be in that throwaway line. It starts with a "bump" on the first page, which Cooper happens to feel when his 4-year-old daughter is sitting on her father's lap watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Two pages later, the bump that he might have been tempted to dismiss has been diagnosed as "a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms' tumor, a 'good cancer, ' a funny pairing of words." Two pages later, it is "stage three, which is not good." Before the end of this chapter, the author has begun to "wonder if there are elements of this story that may get away from me." He is right to wonder, for under this illusion of stylistic control lies a cauldron of powerful emotion that can erupt at any moment. And it does, to the author's surprise at his own anger, which embarrasses him a little in retrospect and surprises readers, because the prose is so measured. But this is a book in which the subtlety of surface control sustains an exquisite tension with the turmoil beneath, as the author finds others "looking at a man who is a little unhinged." His daughter is fine, for now, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and periodic scans. The changes in her are mainly the ones any girl might experience from the ages of 4 to 8. But her father is transformed into a writer who must leave "an angry island" and reconcile the world's horrors with its ineffable beauty. A profoundly moving memoir.

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May 15, 2016
Prolific children's author and illustrator (8: An Animal Alphabet, 2015; Train, 2013) offers witty, wise, and sometimes ornery commentary about how he copes (often not well) with his young daughter's cancer diagnosis. This minimemoir starts with a parent's worst nightmare. While holding his not-quite-five-year-old daughter, Zoe, in his lap at a Chicago Cubs game, he feels a bump under her ribs. The family and doctors immediately schedule surgery. At one point, Cooper notes that except for having a child with cancer, I am the luckiest man in the world. Readers will appreciate his honesty about his anger-management issues, which are at their worst just before his daughter's checkups to be sure she remains cancer-free. And he vents about people who smoke and go to tanning salons, who are hurting not just themselves but their loved ones. He also indulges in a little fun namedropping, including reporting on a get-together with Maurice Sendak, a fellow curmudgeon. Cooper's musings are a good reminder to count blessings, maintain a sense of humor, and live life to the fullest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)