This middle grade novel is such a heartbreakingly beautiful story about childhood cancer from the perspective of the cancer-sufferer’s big sister, Laughter (or “El”, as she prefers to be called). From my perspective it provides kids with a healthy way of understanding not only the process of what one (potentially) goes through with cancer, but it also explores the feelings and emotions that affect the sufferer’s family and friends. It provides some excellent suggestions throughout the story of ways to healthily express emotions, comparing those to unhealthy ways also.But overall the story’s not really a happy one, as the subject would suggest. It deals with real illness, raw emotions, and feelings of helplessness. With that being said, however, it definitely also has plenty of feel-good moments & provides lots of chuckles here and there. But sometimes with cancer comes the inevitability that things will only continue to get worse, and in this story, they do. There is no “happy ending”, but the book definitely helps you realize that it’s important to grab those happy moments whenever you can.On to the story itself...While everyone is focused on Echo, the young girl with cancer, El becomes relegated to the title of “Echo’s sister”.That year El starts at a new arts school, and after finding out within a few days of starting school that her sister has cancer, she decides immediately that she doesn’t want to be known as “the girl whose sister has cancer”. She hides the fact not only from her new friends but also her best friends from her previous school. Therefore, she has nobody to open up to, and it slowly eats away at her. She goes to great lengths to keep the “cancer thing” a secret & she has a really hard time opening up to charity from both strangers and those she knows.Set in the West Village of NYC, the close-knit community rallies around Echo’s family, helping out with all of the random costs associated with medical care. It takes quite a while, but El realizes that everyone’s there for *her* too, and after a charity art auction held by El’s art teacher (and a former art community friend of El’s parents), El realizes what the word “community” really means.This story was written by Paul Mosier, a local author here in Phoenix, AZ. While not based on his experiences identically, Paul pulled from his family’s experiences of having a child with cancer to write this story. I believe this novel is a testament to the love that the Mosier family has for their two daughters, Harmony & Eleri. Sadly Harmony passed away shortly before this book was published, and the book is dedicated to her memory. Paul, Keri & Eleri honour her memory every day.RIP HARMONY SEA.