Who's to Say What Starlight Might Do to the Skin?

by Rita Sommers-Flanagan

In Who’s to Say What Starlight Might Do to the Skin?, the human coauthor is the conduit for irreverent parables that are wrenching and wacky, troubling and tender, always laced with audacious hope. She names the betrayals and mercies of life, and the holy that keeps slipping in through the cracks.The Creative Force of the Universe has never provided pat answers and never will. The Truth does not come in church-shaped boxes.

In these short reports, the entity many of us call God shows up dancing with muddy boots and muffin crumbs on her shirt. These embodiments are singular and plural. God is quack grass taking over the garden and the ache lodged deep in your ribcage.

Raw and unvarnished—heartbreaking, unruly, and tender. This author’s Coauthor is the kind of God who breaks you open and then hands you a seedling, a shovel, or a secondhand couch and says, “Try again.”

These stories don’t offer safety. They offer awakening—to the absurdity of being human in a universe thick with starlight shining from an intimate, unknowable Source.

Here’s what Spiritual Wanderlust’s Kelly Deutsch

“Rita writes like an undiscovered Anne Lamott--but an Anne that lives on a Montana ranch and grapples with an ornery God like a desert mother would. I’ve been eating her words by the bagful. I hope you will too.”

387 pages, Paperback

Published December 13, 2025

Reviews

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book with God as the “co-author”