Same Sun Here

By Silas House & Neela Vaswani

The Correspondent led me to 84, Charing Cross Road, which in turn led me to this epistolary Young Adult novel. Meena, a young Indian immigrant living in Chinatown in New York City, is the pen pal of River, a 12-year-old boy in Eastern Kentucky. These kids are preternaturally bright and terrific correspondents. Both face struggles. Meena and her family are transitioning to life in the US and face housing insecurity. River’s town is threatened by mountaintop removal, a form of strip mining. I would give this book to a young person (9-12 )curious about the wider world and who, with a gentle nudge, could tip into that nearly lost practice of writing letters.