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, Daddy. Miss you so much. Steph.

Steph scribbled those words on a sky lantern before sending it off to her father in heaven who had passed away from cancer. Halfway across the country, Steph’s lantern landed in Matt Mikalatos’s yard.

As a father of three daughters, Matt could not let Steph’s note go unanswered, so he posted an open letter to her on his blog. Matt never could have expected the viral response to his letter that led him on a journey to find Steph—and to bring healing to thousands of others in desperate need of the loving words of a father.

Filled with paternal wisdom and reflections on the relationship between a father­ and their child, Sky Lantern shows how the miraculous events that followed Matt finding the sky lantern in his yard—and the widespread and lasting impact his letter had—prove that the bond between a parent and their child is everlasting.