Between the mountain and the sky A mother's story of love, loss, healing, and hope

A gap-year trip becomes a life-changing experience when 19-year-old Doyne from New Jersey falls in love with the lost children of Nepal. As she recounts in this moving memoir, Doyne was driven to build a refuge for homeless children, where they can be safe, fed, and loved. She returns to the States to raise funds and to found the BlinkNow Foundation to construct in Nepal a children's home, a tuition-free school, a health center, and, eventually, a women's center. Doyne is young and idealistic, and the reality of this undertaking is more difficult than she imagined. Selecting whom to help when there are so many in need is heartbreaking, as is trying to comfort the little ones who cry out at night. Doyne is as frank about the anguish as she is about the joys. Her aim is to empower people rather than change them, but her foundation's work is often hampered by political foes and local conflicts. Help comes from unexpected sources, including her hometown, and strength comes from her fellow workers and the children they care for. In this inspiring account, Doyne reminds us, "All we can do, as life rushes in and out, is hold each other close and let love shape us."

Doyne, founder of Kopila Valley Children's Home, traces in this affecting work the extraordinary decade in which she "moved to Nepal, built a house, raised fifty-four children... and experienced the wildest love imaginable." After working with Nepali refugees at a school on the Ganges river in 2009, Doyne decided, at age 19, to drain her college fund to build a home for orphaned children in war-torn Surkhet. She charts her love affair with the town, while weaving in the inspiring story of her personal growth alongside that of her organization, colleagues, and children--from raising funds for her nonprofit, BlinkNow, to being caught in the crossfire of political strife with the government ("They accuse me of... exploiting the children, and being a Christian conversion organization, which is illegal in Nepal") to growing BlinkNow's mission to include education and female empowerment. Doyne's writing is by turns humorously self-effacing--"I'm not the first white girl to cross an ocean with a backpack to try to find herself on (well, near) a mountain"--and achingly moving, most notably when she recognizes the "horrible luxury" of grief she is afforded in the wake of one child's death. This soulful story of tenacity is immensely inspiring. Agent: Margaret Riley King, William Morris Endeavor. (Feb.)