Journey Home

Six-year-old Pushpa is about to make a journey that will change her life.Leaving behind the world she has always known in India, she begins a long trip across the ocean to America, carrying her few belongings in a brown paper bag. Waiting at the end of the journey is a new family, a new home, and a life she cannot yet imagine.As Pushpa travels farther from everything familiar, she experiences the world through the eyes of a child-watching, wondering, remembering, and trying to understand what is happening around her. Along the way, unexpected acts of kindness bring her three special gifts. Each one becomes a small source of comfort during an enormous journey, reminding her that kindness can appear in the most unexpected places.Based on author Pushpa Devi's true childhood memories, Journey Home is a tender picture book about adoption, courage, identity, belonging, and the quiet power of human kindness. Rather than defining a child by the difficult circumstances surrounding her, the story stays close to Pushpa's own experience: her curiosity, uncertainty, observations, and moments of wonder as she encounters a world that is completely new to her.Journey Home is the first book in the Blue Bear Series, a continuing story inspired by Pushpa Devi's childhood. Throughout the series, readers follow Pushpa as she begins to understand her new world while holding on to the memories and identity she brought with her from India. At her side is Blue Bear, her beloved powder-blue teddy bear, who becomes a familiar companion as her story continues.Warm, thoughtful, and told from a child's perspective, Journey Home offers young readers and the adults who share books with them an opportunity to talk about family, adoption, change, kindness, identity, and what it can mean to search for a sense of home.For children ages 4-8, Journey Home is the beginning of one little girl's extraordinary true journey-and a reminder that sometimes the smallest acts of kindness are the ones we carry with us the longest.