Everybody’s Daughter, by Michael J. Sullivan, is both the second book of a trilogy as well as a novel that can easily stand on its own. You don’t have to have read Necessary Heartbreak, the first in the trilogy, in order to enjoy this one (but you should because it adds to the richness of the read and because Necessary Heartbreak is a great title).

Everybody’s Daughter centers on Michael Stewart, a long-widowed forty-something whose greatest accomplishment is raising his 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on his own after his wife was killed in a car accident. A troubled family history and the guilt and grief he feels over his wife’s death has left Michael struggling to connect with the world and others. And he’s also dealing with the normal challenges any parent does with a daughter who is no longer a little girl but still needs her dad. While volunteering at their church, he and Elizabeth discovered a tunnel that led them to First Century Jerusalem in the week before Christ’s death. Four months later, he is still pondering the meaning of what he saw and who he met, especially a woman named Leah, who helped save him and Elizabeth from a brutal Roman soldier and with whom Michael fell in love. When Michael has the chance to enter the tunnel again, he does. Elizabeth follows him, not knowing that her father has already returned. Michael is blamed for Elizabeth’s disappearance. Father and daughter must fight their separate battles in separate centuries.

Everybody’s Daughter works on a number of levels. Yes, it’s a “Christian” novel, because faith does play a large part in Michael’s journey, but it is much more than a “God will make you happy” novel.  Parts of it feel like a mystery as Michael tries to find Elizabeth. In Michael, Sullivan has drawn a deeply rich, complex character who has as many doubts about God and forgiveness and as much pent-up anger and guilt as the rest of us. He’s not an anti-hero; he’s imperfect and flawed and genuine.

What moved me the most about this book is that it is filled with genuine emotion that isn’t overwrought and with a view of faith and forgiveness that feels natural and accessible. (There’s actually a little inter-faith scene that adds some comic relief at a crucial point.) Everybody’s Daughter is a difficult book to classify. Is it religious fiction? Historical fiction? Mystery? Mainstream fiction? It’s a little bit of all those things, and it’s a great read. Give it a try. (Now I can’t wait for the third book.)

1. I am unable to write in the present tense.
2. You won’t catch me writing in second person.
3. My mom says I’m not allowed to write a dead mother story

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My mom died ten years ago today. Before she died, I had heard people say that someone had a “good death,” but the phrase always sounded hollow. Her death taught me what that phrase really means.

This is what you need to know about my mother for this story to make any sense: While the words “kinder and gentler” were kind of ruined by George Bush I, they epitomize who she was. She was kinder and gentler than anyone you know. She was also a hobby printer and long-time member of the American Amateur Press Association (AAPA), a one-time owner of a used bookstore, and the manager of the bookstore at Ursuline College. Yeah, we were kind of a bookish family.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer on September 12, 2001, (remember that day? I have some vague memory of some important happening the day before.) The cancer had already metastasized to her brain. She was gone six months later. (I feel compelled to add that no, she didn’t smoke. But she grew up near the steel mills of Youngstown and married a man who smoked back in the day when people still smoked indoors at the dinner table with their kids around.)

My mom and I spent a lot of time together before she died. Heck, we always spent a lot of time together and talked frequently. Towards the end, we said that there was nothing left unsaid between us but that we were never at a loss for words.

She got weaker and weaker as the cancer decimated her body.  The last few days of her life, she stopped eating and was in what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the “Bardo”–the place between life and death. It was as though she had already entered that last peaceful sleep. My siblings and I were privately wonder when “It” would happen.

My mom had a birthday calendar (which I have now inherited) that not only had anniversaries and birthdays of friends and family but things like the date Thomas Merton entered the monastery and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ birthday (who wasn’t actually a family friend). Things happened to her on significant dates. We felt sure that she would die on a significant date.

She died at Little Sisters of the Poor, where she spent the last six weeks of her life. She had worked there part-time in a post-retirement job, and I think to her it felt gentler and less permanent than going to hospice. The night she died, the nuns there (who are saints on earth, every last one of them–don’t let anyone tell you different) said that March 8 was a very special day because it is the Feast of St. John of God. He’s the patron of hospitals and their order holds him very dear. So that seemed nice.

When my mother did die, it was as peaceful and gentle as her nature. One of the nuns had said it would be “like a candle going out,” and it was. All of her children and almost all of her sons and daughters-in-law were there. (My husband wasn’t there yet.) We sang songs to her (some that she had written). There was a moment when we had stopped singing, and one of my sisters mentioned that we had left purses, etc. sitting out in the common room down the hall. Why this would matter in a nursing home at 7:45 on a Friday night, I don’t know, but I said I’d go check on our stuff. About 20 seconds later, my sister-in-law came running down the hall and said, “She’s gone.”

I went back in and one of my sisters said, “She opened her eyes for a second, and then she was gone.” They had rung for the nurse on duty, who came in, checked her pulse and said, “She’s not dead.”

That’s when my husband walked in. She waited until I had someone to hold onto, and then she went, just as peacefully as a candle going out. A friend said later that she must have sent me out of the room because I was her baby. Maybe I’ve always been marked as different.

A few weeks later, I met my sisters at my mother’s apartment to start going through her things. I was the first one, and I wandered around her belongings wondering where she had gone. There was a small, slightly worn copy of Lives of the Saints sitting on top of one of the bookcases. I’m not sure why or how it got there. Nobody had been in her apartment for a while–she hadn’t lived there for nearly two months. But I picked it up and turned to March 8, which was indeed the feast of St. John of God, patron saint of printers. And booksellers.

After the chills left my spine, the world seemed much clearer and some of the pain from her death lifted. Ten years on, I still miss her, but I’m at peace with the loss. May we all have such a good death.

Math equations as given to me by my six-year-old daughter. I haven’t checked her answers because I’m not familiar with all the formulas, but I’m pretty sure they’re all correct.

bird + bird = robin
caterpillar + caterpillar = egg
200 – butterfly = polka dot
4 minus + butterfly = green
bathing suit – princesses = pretty (I would assume that princesses – bathing suit = embarrassment)
towel + towel = hands
4 x towel = wash
pink x grain = bread
lotion + cream = whipped cream
toothpaste + toothbrush = teeth (duh, even I knew that)
princesses + princesses = pretty
clown + flower = rose
dots + soap = wash
garbage can + tissue = dirty
cup + cat = spill (I had a “Eureka!” moment when I first saw this equation.)
cat x dog = animals
dog + sofa = bad
dentist + doctor = fix
balloon kick + star = clown

What’s in the latest issue of The Cleveland Review? Well, um, a short story I wrote called “Slush,” plus some other great short fiction, poetry, photography, and non-fiction.

The Cleveland Review (TCR) celebrates its one-year anniversary with this issue, so I’m glad to be a part of it. I admire their commitment to the literature of the Rust Belt. It’s made me think more about how I portray the area where I grew up–and where I still live–and challenged me to think of my work in a larger context. Certain themes, places, characters continually surface in my writing. Just about everything I write takes place somewhere in Northeast Ohio. Just as my dreams frequently take place in the house in which I grew up (even if the dream is supposed to be taking place in, say, a desert, the architecture, the structure where I am is always my childhood home), my fiction always seems somehow to be tied to this region. I can’t escape it (nor do I want to), so I might as well embrace it.

I hope you’ll embrace The Cleveland Review too. Check out their archives for the first two issues too. My favorite story from TCR is in the first issue–“Kearsley Street Bridge” by Sally York. It will haunt you. I hope you find a favorite story too (maybe “Slush,” maybe something else).

Q. What is the one force that can conquer even death?

a. Love
b. Love
c. All of the above

For me, this pretty much sums up Never Eighteen, by Megan Messina Bostic. Technically it’s a Young Adult novel, but as a not-so-young-adult, I found it an enjoyable read as well. Seventeen-year-old Austin Parker is a leukemia patient whose time is no longer being measured in years or months but in weeks. Austin corrals his best friend (also the girl of his dreams) Kaylee to chauffeur him on one last weekend in which he tries to finish all of his unfinished business. What I enjoyed about Never Eighteen is that this isn’t what you might expect a teenaged-boy’s bucket list to be. Yes, he goes on the carnival ride that scares the crap out of him and tries his hand at pool hopping, but he also apologizes to the kid he beat up in grade school, talks to the mother of a friend who died, and generally tries to bandage the people he loves who are hurting. It’s a noble effort that he knows will not completely succeed. The effort is enough for him, and for the reader.

Austin is very real kid to me. I liked him. Bostic does a fine job of creating a likeable protagonist who can carry the reader along on an emotional journey whose end we know is preordained. It’s worth your time.

I don’t drink coffee. I’ve been told I don’t need the caffeine, which is probably true. However, I have a sweet tooth and a penchant for hot chocolate. Some of the best is at Phoenix Coffee because they put cinnamon in it, which may be the greatest spice of all time. (I actually wrote a blog post in praise of cinnamon a few months ago. Seriously, love the stuff.) I stopped by the drive-through on my way to work last week. It was a cold morning, and work is always a chilly environment (temperature-wise, not in the esoteric atmospheric sense), so a medium hot chocolate (no whipped cream, please), sounded like a little cup of heaven. When I pulled up to the window, the person at the counter was helping a customer. I waited, then a second barista came up and took my order. I watched her make the hot chocolate, put a lid on it, walk towards the drive-through window then, denied! She put the cup down near the window and turned to help a customer. At first I thought she was just answering a question, but then she started helping another customer. I waited, watching the minutes tick by and hoping I wouldn’t be late for work. The barista showed no sign of ever coming back to the drive-through window and so I did something I’ve never done before. I left. I’ve never walked out on an order before, but now I have.

This morning, the first of November, there was frost on the ground. I had a really good early swim and on the way to work had a hankering for some cinnamon-y hot chocolate. On a whim, I decided to give the Phoenix drive-through one more chance. This time, there was no one at the counter and a friendly-faced barista greeted me and took my order. She made it in record time and brought it to the window. As she was handing it to me, a second barista popped her head into the drive-through window.

“It’s free,” she said. “The lady before paid for it. It was a random act of kindness.”

This was unexpected. I’ve never been the recipient of a random act of kindness, but instinctively I knew what to do. I smiled. “I’d like to do the same,” I said and handed her the few dollars in my hand.

Glad I gave them another chance.

I went to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings last night at the Beachland Ballroom and my head exploded. I’ve been listening to their CDs for years but hadn’t seen them live until now. They are a funk/soul revival band that have been around for about ten years but only got big a couple of years ago. Sharon Jones is 55, which is way past the age most people are comfortable getting up in front of a crowd of strangers in a short dress and doing the Mashed Potato or the Pony, but that’s exactly what Sharon Jones does every night. She didn’t hit it big until she was in her 50s. For years she worked as a wedding singer, as a corrections officer at Rikers Island (seriously, she’s like five foot nothing but can shrivel you with a glance), and being a back-up singer for other people. She hooked up with members of the Dap-Kings (who weren’t yet called the Dap-Kings) in the late 1990s and they released their first CD in 2002.

Sharon Jones gives me hope. As a writer, you deal with rejection All The Fucking Time. It’s really hard to keep sending things out and to keep writing and polishing new works because sometimes you wonder if anyone will ever read your stuff. So I think about her chugging along through her twenties and thirties and forties, knowing she had something awesome inside her, and not finding the right opportunity to let it out. And I look at myself chugging through my thirties and forties and think perhaps there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps it will be wearing a fringed dress and dancing the Bugaloo.

I don’t have any particular affiliation with the letter “B.” It doesn’t appear in my first, middle, or last names or in the names of anyone in my family (or my dogs). Yet I find that many of my favorite things in life begin with “B.” Herewith, in no particular order except the order in which they occurred to me and not necessarily preference, my favorite things that begin with the letter “B.” Any you’d like to add?

Books
Bicycles
Baseball
Bach
Beethoven
Beer
Burritos (with black beans)
Brie
Baroque (music, that is)
Bagels (if cream cheese were bream beese, I’d add that to the list too)
Beaches (places with sand and water, not the sappy film of the same name)
Baths
Barns
(The) Beatles
Broccoli
Blueberries, oh heck, berries of any kind