Matt Mikalatos offers a poignant and compassionate look at a father’s relationship with his children, the healing power of a small act of kindness, and the certainty that even death can’t stop love in a deeply moving memoir inspired by a sky lantern with a scribbled note and the journey to find the child who wrote it. “Love you, Dad. Miss you so much. Steph.” A brokenhearted daughter scribbled those words on a sky lantern before setting it aloft. She had no way of knowing the lantern would fly halfway across the country. Matt Mikalatos found the lantern, broken and crushed, the words still legible. As a father of three daughters, Matt could not let Steph’s heart-wrenching note go unanswered, but he wasn’t sure where he could find her. So he posted an open letter to her on his blog, which went viral overnight. Little did he know how that small act of kindness would lead him to the real Steph and change his family’s life in remarkable ways. A poignant and lyrical account of the beauty and wonder of domestic life, Sky Lantern tells the miraculous events that followed Matt finding the sky lantern in his yard—of meeting Steph and forming a friendship that impacted him and his family—proving that the bond between a parent and their child is lasting and far-reaching. Sky Lantern will bring a tear to your eyes and a smile to your face as you fall in love with Matt and his family in this heartwarming, beautifully written memoir. This book is for people with questions about what it means to love, to be loved, and to love well. It’s for anyone who has had a parent relationship: absent, complicated, or amazing. It’s about embracing the truth about ourselves: that we are worthy of love, and that love makes our lives worth living. “Mikalatos exquisitely describes the powerful bond he shares with his three daughters in Sky Lantern. A lovely, beautiful book that reinforces the importance of exploring our own invisible thread connections, and how one simple act of kindness—one small gesture of caring—can change the lives of others forever.” (Laura Schroff, #1 New York Times bestselling author, An Invisible Thread) "Sky Lantern reminds us that the smallest flame can brighten the deepest gloom. I loved it! It's easy these days to feel disconnected from other people because we all have our problems. But when a sky lantern, in whatever form, appears to us with its message of need, this book tells us what to do: Reach out, give, love ." (Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times Best-selling Author of Rocket Boys and Carrying Albert Home) Matt Mikalatos works for a non-profit dedicated to helping people live better, fuller lives. He has done non-profit work all over the world, and he and his family lived in Asia for several years. He currently lives in the Portland, Oregon area with his wife and three daughters. Sky Lantern 1 Picking Up BROKEN THINGS GATHER IN MY front yard. On Wednesdays the garbage truck lumbers through our neighborhood in Vancouver, Washington, squeezing between parked cars. By Saturday the missed bits of trash, blown by the wind, assemble on the last street of our neighborhood. Empty aluminum cans, scraps of pizza boxes, plastic forks, and crushed water bottles get caught in rose thorns or shoved into the grass, half clinging to the sidewalk, arranging themselves in a semicircle in front of my house. Our houses pile up close to one another in suburban conformity. A plum tree stands guard at every corner. My house stands at the western edge of our cluster. A fence runs alongside the street. When my wife, Krista, and I first moved here, we had no money for landscaping, so I scoured the Internet for free plants. I drove twenty miles to collect what looked like a pile of dead branches. Dropping the brown, thorny canes into the narrow strip of dirt yielded a thriving forest of Old World roses called Chapeau de Napoléon. Every spring, heavy pink blooms appear. They don’t last long, but they’re intensely fragrant. It’s amazing what a small bit of water, sun, and dirt can do. I occasionally peel the jungle of roses away from the fence to clean out the trash wedged into the briars. Discolored aluminum cans with energy drink logos crowd alongside microwave burrito wrappers and yellowed single sheets from newspapers. Once I found an entire unopened can of cat food, a tiny gray and white tabby face staring at me from deep in the forest of thorns. It’s a maddening ritual, picking up the trash that skitters across our front lawn. So you can imagine why I thought the sky lantern was nothing more than a larger-than-usual piece of refuse at the end of my driveway. The driveway isn’t long—about the length of a car. From the front window of my house I could see what appeared to be a large, clear bag plastered half on the sidewalk, half on the driveway. I sighed when I saw it. It was a Saturday, and it had rained hard the night before, and I didn’t want to trudge the twenty-five feet from my front door t