Mitch Albom
“Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of love and loss. You can’t help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic.” –Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club and The Art of Memoir
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom’s most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart.
Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.
With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.”
Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost.
Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.
-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.
Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.
My Opinion
Albom always has those thought-provoking books and I highly recommend this one! He tells you right off that Chika died from an illness and then tells you all about her. He runs an orphanage in Haiti and Chika was one of the children. She was diagnosed with a rare illness and he tells of traveling the world to fight it. More importantly, he tells of the bond that grew between him, his wife and this child.
It is a beautifully written story about love. Truly, it’s hopeful and heartbreaking and heartwarming. Chika will find a way into your heart and hold on.
I’m just going to leave a bunch of quotes here for my review. I don’t like to give a star rating to memoirs but know that this was fabulous!
“Maybe when you put your loved ones down on paper, you forever accept that reality of them, and maybe I don’t want to accept this reality…that words on paper are all I get.”
“It takes a special strength to take care of a child, Chika, and a whole different strength to admit you cannot.”
“There are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.”
“Dying is only one thing to be sad about, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else.”
“A child is both an anchor and a set of wings.”
“The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.”
“Love determines our bonds.”
“What we carry defines who we are. And the effort we make is our legacy.”
“Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together, like eggs being scrambled in a Michigan kitchen. But no matter how a family comes together, and no matter how it comes apart, this is true and will always be true: you cannot lose a child. And we did not lose a child. We were given one. And she was glorious.”
Thank you to Harper Collins for the gifted copy!
Content Summary: The only difficulties one might have with this book is the obvious struggle the child goes through with her illness. It is emotional at times as Albom is telling about himself in the story. He does speak about God, prayer and faith and how those carried him through.
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This is one of my favorite memoirs! 💔
Sounds lovely, adding to tbr!
Even reading the synopsis of this book, I feel like it would make me cry.