An Indian-American girl from New York City becomes pen pals with a boy from the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky. Through letters back and forth, each shares their lives with each other. While they are very different in terms of background they share many things in common (in addition to the obvious commonality of the title, they also both have fathers who away for extended periods of time, they maintain strong bonds with their grandmother, they have a heightened awareness of their environment, they both love to read classics, and they share strong literacy). Through a number of adventures, they pass a year together from a distance.
It's a sweet and pleasant read, but not very big on revelations. And like so many team-written projects, it seemed a bit lazy to me: House and Vaswani simply started writing letters back and forth, challenging the other to respond to what they had written. For entertainment value, it works, and I have no complaints about the quality of the writing. But it doesn't leave much of an impression in the end: two nice kids, struggling to understand each other and their world. How nice.
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