by Christine Kippy Hoene (Author)

Christine "Kippy" Hoene's father spent years trying to teach her to whistle. She never could. She didn't know it was a test.

In 1997, a friend talked Kippy into a tennis lesson. She was terrible at it, and she loved it. She loved being a beginner, loved the particular freedom of being bad at something in public and showing up anyway. So she made a promise to herself: learn a new sport every year. Fencing. Rock climbing. Spelunking. Surfing. Aerial silks. Stand-up paddleboarding. Wing-walking. For fifteen years, she kept the promise.

Then, at fifty-two, a neurologist explained why she had never been able to whistle. She carried the same muscular dystrophy genes that had moved her father from strong to walker to wheelchair, that her grandmother had and that her son would inherit. Hers was one of four generations of bodies built to contract, to stop working. The doctor gave her a timeline: she'd be using a walker in five years.

Kippy had spent fifteen years unknowingly practicing a life that was the exact opposite of what the disease wanted of her. So she made another decision. She kept going. And she is still going today.

Funny, poignant and powerful, The Whistler's Daughter is the story of a woman who chose expansion over contraction. All of us face decline; Kippy Hoene had to stare it in the face at an early age. She chose to fight it by becoming a beginner on purpose, again and again, and by doing so to defy her prognosis every day.