FORWARD ME BACK TO YOU

A summer church trip to Kolkata
allows two American teens to serve, grow, and heal their own
suffering in unexpected ways.

Katina King is a 16-year-old Brazilian
jujitsu champion, a scholarship student at an elite Oakland school, and the
brown-skinned, biracial daughter of a single white mother. After a male student assaults her,
Kat’s anxiety, rage, and anguish disrupt her focus on winning matches and
applying to college. Eighteen-year-old Robin Thornton was adopted as a toddler
from an Indian orphanage by wealthy white Bostonians. He can’t seem to find
true belonging or be more than a rudderless sidekick to his white jock friend. When Kat’s mother
sends her to Boston for a break from Oakland, the teens meet, traveling to Kolkata with their pastor to work with survivors of child
trafficking. Kat decides to teach the young women how to fight while Robin,
now going by Ravi, hopes to find his birth mother. But they learn the hard way
that they must first earn the trust and respect of those they serve and that
service may be very different from what they imagine. Perkins (You Bring the Distant Near, 2017, etc.) celebrates
Christian faith, superheroes, and Kolkata life through the interleaved
perspectives of sympathetic and earnest protagonists and in simple language
that speaks straight to the heart.