A Short Good Life: Her Father Tells Liza's Story of Facing Death. By Philip Lister. Jefferson, NC:  Toplight, 2021,  276 pp., $19.99 paperback.

Learn to love the questions. Then try, as if you were one of the first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Philip Lister has written an important short good book, one which requires courage to read and will remain with the reader for a lifetime. His extraordinary writing evokes a parallel empathic experience in the reader, who will enter a young child's mind during a terrible time in her life when she and her family were forced to ask all the hard questions. The reader will bear witness to her family's utter respect for the truths in those questions as they slowly begin to mirror and struggle with the inner world of their very sick child. Although this may be one of the most painful books that most readers will ever read, Lister's narrative is committed to respecting the truths in a mortally ill child's questions as he acknowledges for himself and for his family that the loss of their child has changed their understanding of themselves, and of their relationships, lives, and purposes in the world. While this is a story of Liza's illness and death, it is also a story of a courageous family's survival and resolution, and can, therefore, leave a reader hopeful and inspired to face such things directly.

His daughter, Liza, fell ill at age 4. Her parents, stunned and shaken by the news, held the perspective that her living, not her dying, would

guide their loving support for each other over the next few years. Both practicing child psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, they decided at the onset of her illness to value and to respond truthfully to their daughter's questions—and also to respect their own unanswerable questions—leading them (as