Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

" 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.

Title : Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
ISBN : null
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    Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family Reviews

  • Elyse Walters

    Don't even get me started on why I wasn't going to read this book -- but as I told my friend Ceecee -- I was a turd...a snob - a turd...I was wrong! I listend to the Audibook...(highly suggest the aud...

  • Julie

    Reading Road Trip 2020Current location: MichiganChildren are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.--Dr. John TrainerAh, children. They wake us, they make us, th...

  • Kloe

    Mitch Albom is going to have a new book and no one here except me on goodreads is hyped for it ??!...

  • Cheri

    ”Hopelessness can be contagious. But hope can be, too, and there is no medicine to match it. Chika’s believing in us helped us believe in ourselves.” In the late 90s, a friend gave me a copy ...

  • Aj the Ravenous Reader

    There was a time when I thought Mitch Albom was losing his magic touch because it seemed like after reading Tuesdays with Morrie, every single book he released next seemed to pale in comparison until ...

  • Candie

    This is a heartbreaking and beautiful story about family and making sure to stop and enjoy life, because we sometimes forget how fragile and precious it really is. It really highlights the beauty and ...

  • Linden

    Author Mitch Albom and his wife Janine run an orphanage in Haiti, and they received a call that one of their favorite children, 5 year old Chika, had something very wrong. The only MRI machine in Hait...

  • Jennifer Blankfein

    I read this labor of love in one sitting and cried all the way through. Mitch Albom and his wife, Janine are incredibly special, and as lucky as Chika was to have them, this precious spitfire little g...

  • Debbie

    Another book by Mitch Albom that solidifies my vote as one of my favorite authors! Along with THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN and FOR ONE MORE DAY, FINDING CHIKA: A LITTLE GIRL, AN EARTHQUAKE, AND ...

  • Carol (Reading Ladies)

    “What we carry defines who we are. And the effort we make is our legacy.” ~Mitch AlbomIn Finding Chika: A Little Girl, An Earthquake, and the Making of a Family, Mitch Albom, well-known author of ...