Falling: A Daughter, A Father, and a Journey Back by Elisha Cooper

 Falling:  A Daughter, A Father, and a Journey Back by Elisha Cooper.  Pantheon Books (Penguin Random House), 2016. Memoir.


I have known the gorgeous work of Elisha Cooper for some years now. His illustrated picture books for children, Farm, Beach, and Train are masterpieces about their respective topics. Full of colorful details, they seem the work of a careful, but happy, person. His prior memoir, Crawling: A Father's First Year is full of happy new fatherhood and the wonder of being a parent and describing the uncertainty of who really learns more during that time, the baby or the parent. A Year in New York is a thick, but small book full of intrigues in the city. The man can both write AND illustrate.


This 2016 book, however, brings new depth to Elisha Cooper's work. While he is holding his four-year-old daughter at a baseball game at Wrigley Field, he notices a small bump under her ribs. It turns out to be a pediatric kidney cancer called Wilms' tumor. Imagine: one day the sky is blue, your child is healthy and the next moment you have a child with cancer. The bottom has literally fallen out, but you must go on. That is the journey that Cooper takes readers on for the next three years of the family's lives.


This sounds like such an awful topic. It sounds like a depressing topic. It sounds like a terrible topic for a book. But, Cooper's writing is eloquent and upbeat while realistic and joyful. He runs the gamut of emotions and continues to love both his daughters and his wife and write other books that show none of this (or maybe they do, but it's so subtle that most readers miss it...I can't wait to reread his whole body of work).


The little family moves back to New York City as they had planned. The descriptions will make readers think they could live there, too. Cooper tells of his high school and college days when he played football. He tells of surviving minefields in the Golan Heights. Nothing is as tough as knowing his child has cancer. Yet, he describes the wonders of working with wood. The family's trip to Florence, Italy makes us long to go there. There is happiness and joy in their daily lives. But, always, there are trips to the hospital for tests and Dr. Lee, who comes off like the doctor we would all want in the lives of our children. Ultimately, and finally, the three year tests are all fine. The cancer is gone.


Can anyone learn to live with cancer? Can cancer be "cured"? Elisha Cooper gives new hope for resounding, positive answers to both. Here's to many more years of great health for him and his family and for many more of those wondrous picture books. I only hope to meet him at a library conference some day and give the man a hug. Better yet, to be in the audience when he accepts a Caldecott Medal one of these years!