Review: Short story: "The Last Father-Daughter Dance" by Lisa Wingate

The Last Father-Daughter Dance by Lisa Wingate
Published January 2026 via Amazon Original Stories

A love story, after a fashion: Kalista has taken a break from her California life to help out her father, who is in desperate need of a heart transplant...but who might or might not get that transplant. With the long-term future up in the air, they decide to make the most of the immediate future.

Always nice to see short stories (and longer works, but this is a short story, so...) focusing on non-romantic relationships. There are characters here beyond Kalista and her father, yes, and there is potential for a romance to develop, but mostly this is about family, and what is important, and to a certain extent how you carry on anyway. I'm not sure I needed Kalista-as-Olympian (it adds to the backstory, but something else could easily have been substituted without changing the trajectory of the story), and I will say that any side character who is so blatantly uninterested in a main character's desire for privacy is not going to last in that main character's life. (Said character is not written to be a bad person, but ooof. "Let's capitalize on the family trauma your family wants to keep private" is never a good look.)

At any rate, it's a quick read and a sweet one.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.