Customer Reviews

Macburnie King in Soulmates: A Novel to End World Hunger (Soul to Soul Series)

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This is an adventure novel featuring MacBurnie King, an American teenager, on a life-changing journey to India. It combines a worthy message with a gripping story and appealing characters. MacBurnie persuades her class to adopt an Indian child through an agency to end world hunger, and for months she and the class exchange letters and photos with a woman named Lori working with this little boy and others like him in the Indian countryside. Then a letter from Lori comes saying that the little boy is no longer with them and they don't know where he is. This spurs MacBurnie to travel to India herself to find the little boy. From here the novel is a fast-moving adventure for MacBurnie and the reader to see first the wealth and sophistication of Indian urban life, then the unbelievable poverty of village life, with its lack of medical services, flood and drought, suffering and death. To see this from the viewpoint of the courageous and compassionate MacBurnie helps readers get some notion of the meaning of hunger and suffering in the context of a completely different culture than their own. There is enough adventure and romance to please the most reluctant reader. This novel is introduced by Mother Teresa and The Gandhi Foundation, and celebrities such as Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King, and Janet Jackson praise the series in the first pages, along with endorsements by such organizations as YWCA, UNICEF and Save the Children. Attached to this novel is a nonfiction work entitled India Revealed: The True Roots of Hinduism and Our World's Largest Democracy, filled with b/w photos related to India and encyclopedia-type entries on many aspects of Indian culture.

Claire Rosser, Editor KLIATT