READING WAS MY PASSPORT

A young girl reading in bed.

Long before I packed a suitcase, I traveled through books.

Growing up in Jamaica, I didn’t have the means to see the world right away, but the pages of a story carried me farther than I could have imagined. I wandered through cities I had never heard of, tasted foods I couldn’t yet name, and learned about people whose lives looked so different from mine, and yet, somehow, not so different at all.

Those early journeys planted a seed of curiosity in me. And though many of them were fiction, they taught me that the world was wide and waiting, that friendships and discoveries weren’t bound by borders. Later, when I finally had the chance to study and travel abroad, it felt like stepping into a story I’d already begun.

That’s one of the reasons I wrote Young Explorers, The Magic of Cape Town. I wanted to give young readers their own “passport," a way to experience new landscapes, cultures, and connections even if they haven’t yet boarded a plane. Because reading doesn’t just take us somewhere new; it expands the circle of who and what we care about.

Books open the door. Travel walks us through it. Together, they change how we see the world and how we see ourselves.