On Our Bookshelves – I Will Always Write Back

***

ON OUR BOOKSHELVES

***

BOOK: I Will Always Write Back

AUTHORS: Caitlin Alifirenka & Martin Ganda with Liz Welch

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2015

On the recommendation of a middle school librarian, I bought this book for my 11-year-old daughter, and gave it to her for Christmas. I ended up reading it first, and thought it was a terrific book, especially for young people. Then she read it over the winter break, and agreed with me.

***

It’s the true story of pen pals, a long distance friendship that developed between them, and how this correspondence changed two lives over the course of six years. Caitlin was a seventh grader in 1997, and in many ways a typical American suburban kid: she lived a small town, and her world was small. She was focused on adolescent concerns: boys she had crushes on, mean girls at school, shopping trips. She was sheltered and naïve…but she had an incredibly big heart. Martin was a brilliant student (first in his class) from a poor family in Zimbabwe. Like Caitlin, he was a very kind person and a good friend. His life was hard, and started becoming significantly harder when his father lost his job, and when hyperinflation took hold of his country. When he was no longer able to pay his school fees, Caitlin sent him her babysitting money, which became a lifeline, not just for Martin, but for his entire family. To put things in perspective, a $1 bill she put in the mail covered the cost of his family’s groceries for two weeks.

Caitlin eventually enlisted her family to assist, and due largely to the efforts of her mother (who had a heart as big as her daughter’s) they saved his family from penury and secured Martin a full scholarship to college in the United States. (Kudos here to the late Father Edmund Dobbin, who was the president of Villanova University at the time, and who responded to their personal and heartfelt appeal, directing his admissions office to find the money for this extraordinary young man.)

Martin changed Caitin’s life as well–not quite as dramatically, perhaps, but his friendship opened her eyes to the developing world, to extreme poverty, to injustice, and to her own privileges. Inspired largely by him, she pursued a career in medicine, and is now an emergency room nurse, putting her generosity and sympathy to very good use.

They’re best friends to this day.

***

RATING (one to five whistles, with five being the best: 3 1/2 Whistles

***

HOW TO PURCHASE: Amazon

***

Laura LaVelle is an attorney and writer who lives in Connecticut, in a not quite 100-year-old house, along with her husband, two daughters, and a cockatiel.

Laura can be contacted at laura@newswhistle.com.

***

Lead-In Image Courtesy of Apple_Mac / Shutterstock.com

***

ALSO ON OUR BOOKSHELVES:

A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson

A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman

A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler

A Room With a View, E.M. Forster

An English Murder, Cyril Hare

An Infamous Army, Georgette Heyer

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Anne Of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery

Before the Fall, Noah Hawley

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon

Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan

Books for Living, Will Schwalbe

Bunker Hill, Nathan Philbrick

Burmese Days, George Orwell

Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast

Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Cloudstreet, Tim Winton

Cockpit Confidential, Patrick Smith

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons

Diary of a Provincial Lady, E.M. Delafield

Doctor Jazz, Hayden Carruth

Ed Emberly’s Drawing Book of Animals, Ed Emberly

Endangered Pleasures, Barbara Holland

Envious Casca, Georgette Heyer

Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee

Good Poems, Garrison Keillor

Gowanus Waters, Steven Hirsch

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, & Jack Thorne

Heads in Beds, Jacob Tomsky

Hemingway Didn’t Say That, Garson O’Toole

Here is New York, E.B. White

Hide My Eyes, Margery Allingham

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, Laurie Colwin

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

Lexicon, Max Barry

Longbourn, Jo Baker

Madeleine’s Ghost, Robert Girardi

Malice Aforethought, Frances Iles

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Jon Krakauer

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

My Life in France, Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

Notorious RBG, Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder

One Summer: America 1927, Bill Bryson

Out of the Blackout, Robert Bernard

Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley

Plotted: A Literary Atlas, Andrew DeGraff

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle…and Other Modern Verse, Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Rose Madder, Stephen King

Sanditon, Jane Austen and Another Lady

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carlo Rivelli

Straying from the Flock: Travels in New Zealand, Alexander Elder

Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart

Tales of the Unexpected, Roald Dahl

The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Ed., Lewis Carroll & Martin Gardner (with original illustrations by John Tenniel)

The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith

The Dancer of Izu, Kawabata Yasunari

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

The House with a Clock in Its Walls, John Bellairs

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Oliver Sacks

The Martian, Andy Weir

The Missing Piece, Shel Silverstein

The Modern Kids, Jona Frank

The Monogram Murders, Sophie Hannah

The Mother & Child Project, Hope Through Healing Hands (ed.)

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss, Theodor Geisel (illustrator), Maurice Sendak (introduction)

The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats

The Swans of Fifth Avenue, Melanie Benjamin

The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer

The Three Questions, Jon J Muth

The Translator, Nina Schuyler

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce

The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, Saki

The Weird World of Wes Beattie, John Norman Harris

The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin

The Women in Black, Madeleine St John

They Call Me Naughty Lola, David Rose

Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

What If?, Randall Munroe

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life, Eleanor Roosevelt

Up At the Villa, W. Somerset Maugham

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff