This fascinating collection by Buddhist writer Francesca Hampton explores modern situations in both India and America through the prism of Tibetan Buddhist teachings. From a lonely paddle boarder contemplating suicide on the dark Pacific, to a wayward Tibetan lama on a Greyhound bus, to a journalist who reconnects with a journey begun in a previous life in an interview with the Dalai Lama, it is a welcome addition to the emerging genre of Buddhist fiction.

The distance from California to Hawaii is more than 2500 miles, an impossibly long voyage by sea for five troubled youngsters, yet for all of them this daunting journey has come to seem the only way back to families they have lost. Jason Hitole, the eldest at 14, once learned how to manage his fathers yacht, the Makai, in the sunny waters off Hawaii, but now he must navigate it accurately across the greatest ocean on earth, relying only on his own ingenuity and what little he can teach his novice crew in the short time they have. Somehow he must bring home his younger siblings Jenny and Christopher and keep safe their friends 12-year-old Michelle and 11-year-old Jimmy. But when Jason is knocked unconscious in a great storm, the youngsters finally understand this voyage may never reach its destination unless they can figure out how to sail by themselves.