Lift by Kelly Corrigan

Ha! I'm finally reviewing a book and I'm doing it before any of you voracious readers.

I picked up Kelly Corrigan's new book, Lift, a few nights ago after I had spent my evening at my kids' science fair; sweating in a crush of parents and students, pelted at regular intervals with colored ping pong balls shot from the vacuum cannon at the end of my row of exhibits. We had started the evening with multiple threats to eat dinner, a few admonishments to "stop that whining or you can go to bed instead of the science fair" and my daughter's fall on the way into the school that resulted in a vigorous clean-up of the elbow wound from the school principal.

Needless to say, when I finally crawled into bed with Corrigan's disappointingly thin new book, I was spent. Thankfully, the size of her book was deceiving. The book has the same insight, humor and heart as The Middle Place, just in miniature.

Lift is written as a letter to her girls on the night before they start a new school year. Corrigan's description of the backpacks by the front door and the outfits picked out and waiting struck a chord. We do the same thing in my house.

She goes on to talk about her decision to have children and how it wasn't really a decision. How "in the years before I met your dad, when I was talking to a God I wasn't sure I really believed in, I whittled down all my requests to one: children. You." She also tells her children that if she had to pick a fate for them, cancer or infertility, she would pick cancer. Because that's how important being their mom is to her. This was one of the many passages that reduced me to a sniffling, sobbing mess. And all I could think was, "Yeah, me too."

This book is a beautiful gift to her children, but it is also the letter we should all be writing to our kids. So many times I nodded in agreement, or her words reminded me of a similar story from our own history. So maybe this is the best part of her book, maybe it will inspire all of us to write our own letter and share our own hearts.

I'm still holding out hope that she's got a full-length book in the works. But this book reminded me of why I'm a fan - and that's a good start.