You don’t find a lot of book reviews here. Still …

One day, a novel finds its way to the father of an art therapist. She is the mother of a nine-year-old girl who reads like someone twice her age and writes as if her thoughts arrived fully grown. When the girl is seven, she announces, “I don’t like the word ‘death.’ From now on, it’s ‘return to magic.’”

The grandfather reads twenty pages and knows this book should one day belong to the girl. He mails it to his daughter with a note: Please save this for her.

And so, years later, it ends up in the girl’s hands. Now a teen, she reads slowly, reverently, as if the characters might get nervous if she rushes. She laughs out loud. She cries quietly. She closes the book. Waits. Thinks. Then she opens her laptop.

She doesn’t know it, not yet — but in time, millions will read her stories. In time, her name will sit on book spines in languages she hasn’t learned. In time, journalists will ask for interviews.

She will barely notice. Because by then, she’s already in conversation with the people in her next book.

Only part of this story has happened so far, but it is of course inspired by “My Friends,” Fredrik Backman’s stirring novel about four friends who challenge us to stop a second and think about how we get from here to there. We’d like to believe the journey is logical, planned, intentional. It rarely is.

“Life,” Backman says, “is long, but it moves at high speed, a single step here or there can be enough to ruin everything.” Yet it is also true that, “It’s a long life, but fast, one single step in the right direction can be enough.”

In Joar, Ali, Ted, and the artist we see many truths we know but often scroll past. Backman gives us space and reason to reflect. As on the long train ride where nothing and everything seem to happen at the same time.

Why should we stop? What’s done is done, after all. And wherever we land is where we are. Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And that’s it. We examine these moments because they give us insight. And by the way, we know who’s willing to do that — and who isn’t.

Backman spends over 400 pages making the case for self-examination, introspection, a personal audit. It’s easy to identify with his characters. As children and as adults, they speak in voices that go with their ages. Nothing is amiss. There is never a dream-breaking moment where the reader feels a child wouldn’t say it that way.

That’s the magic of the book. It brings us back to all the crossroad moments that felt like nothing at the time — until they changed everything.

In my own life, one of those moments came in eleventh grade, when I agreed to a double date I didn’t want to go on. That day I met the woman who would become my wife. We had three children. They married. And now we have seven grandchildren.

One of them, I’m sure, will be a writer.

What’s the smallest choice you’ve made that changed everything? Drop a short version of your story in the comments.

Steve Piacente is Director of Training at The Communication Center in Washington, D.C., the owner of Next Phase Life Coaching, and the author of three novels and a self-help book: “Your New Fighting Stance: Good Enough Isn’t, and You Know It.” See his photos at: piacentephotos.com.