The one thin eleven-year-old Lexie Lewis wants more than anything is to leave Portland, Oregon, where she has been staying with her strict grandparents, and rejoin her mother, a carefree singer in San Francisco. But Mama’s new husband doesn’t think a little girl should live with parents who work all night and sleep all day. Lexie’s class has been raising money to send a doll to the children of Japan in a friendship exchange, and when Lexie learns that the girl who writes the best letter to accompany the doll will be sent to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco, she knows she just has to be the winner. From Shirley Parenteau, here is a heartwarming historical novel inspired by a little-known true event, a Friendship Doll exchange organized in 1926 by teacher-missionary Dr. Sidney Gulick, in which American children sent more than 12,000 dolls to Japan in hopes of avoiding a future war.
