Forward Me Back to You
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning author of You Bring the Distant Near explores identity, homecoming, and the legacy of assault in this personal and ambitious new novel.
Katina King is the reigning teen jujitsu champion of Northern California, but she’s having trouble fighting off the secrets in her past.
Robin Thornton was adopted from an orphanage in India and is reluctant to take on his future. If he can’t find his roots, how can he possibly plan ahead?
Robin and Kat meet in the most unlikely of places—a summer service trip to Kolkata to work with survivors of human trafficking. As bonds build between the travelmates, Robin and Kat discover that justice and healing are tangled, like the pain of their pasts and the hope for their futures. You can’t rewind life; sometimes you just have to push play.
In turns heart wrenching, beautiful, and buoyant, Mitali Perkins's Forward Me Back to You focuses its lens on the ripple effects of violence—across borders and generations—and how small acts of heroism can break the cycle.
This title has Common Core connections.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perkins's latest follows alternating protagonists: brown-skinned Kat, a superhero-obsessed, tough-as-nails regional jiujitsu champion and California girl with a single, white-skinned mother; and India-born superhero enthusiast Robin, adopted by wealthy white parents in Boston. After Kat fights off an attempted sexual assault by a popular athlete at school, her mother sends her east to stay with a family friend's great-aunt, Grandma Vee. Kat is angry at the world (at her mom for sending her away, at the "wolf" who attacked her), but when Grandma Vee asks Kat to visit with her friend Robin at her Christian church's youth group, she reluctantly complies. Soon, Kat gets pulled into a trip to fight human trafficking and serve victims in Kolkata Robin's birthplace. While in India, Robin takes on his birth name, Ravi, and the two face their demons, meet family, make friends, and find the best inside themselves called upon. In fast-moving prose that is layered with emotion rage, grief, dismay, hope, vulnerability, love Perkins's novel pulses with heart and questions of identity as well as talk of faith, prayer, God, and social justice. Ages 14 up.
