I held my personal grief for decades until, with the help of the author, I ceremonially metabolized my grief into a thing of beauty. Like a magic genie, I popped out of the bottle I had crawled into with a renewed love of life. In The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, Prechtel leads the reader down this same trail of animals and life in the womb while revealing that grief is the sister of praise. Like Prechtel’s other books, this astonishing book will draw me back often to re-examine the beauty of a life lived well.