Kathleen Bartholomew, sister and sometime co-writer of the late Kage Baker, writers about her sister, charity, and the sharing of The Hotel Under The Sand in her blog entry “It Has To Go Around, First” at Kathleen, Kage and the Company.

Kage Baker held, as one of her core philosophies, the venerable axiom: What goes around, comes around.

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She wasn’t, ever, anything close to rich. But she did what she could. On Federal tax forms, when they ask you if you want to donate to causes, Kage chose things like education, national parks, endangered animals, veteran’s care. And she never, ever contributed anything to the government’s Presidential campaign slush funds – she said she wasn’t going to encourage politicians by letting them think their power grabs were a legitimate public charity.

Whenever Kage got an advance or a royalty, we went shopping for the local Food Bank. Big checks meant cases of canned tuna and chicken – protein’s hard to come by at Food Banks. Smaller checks went to peanut butter, pasta, rice, beans and other sturdy carbs. The guys at the warehouse got to know us by sight. That made Kage proud.

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Today, I got a call from Jacob Weisman, the splendid head of Tachyon Publications. Jacob was good for Kage, and he’s been good for me, too. He’s a joy to work with; he and all his fine folks at Tachyon.

Jacob had been contacted by a non-profit charity called Worldreader, which can be found, Dear Readers, at (http://www.worldreader.org/).   These good people supply ebooks to developing countries, to phones and tablets and Kindles. Most of them are in the keeping of schools and teachers, and the books are supplied to them for the use of their students. Especially little girls … So when Jacob asked me how I felt about donating The Hotel Under the Sand (published by him) to this project – I said YES!

Yes, yes, and yes again. This is the sort of thing Kage wrote the book  for: our niece Emma, a little girl in a bad spot, who needed to know the world could be better if she was strong and brave and true.  The Emma for whom she wrote it is a young woman now – in Annapolis, studying to be (surprise!) a naval officer. Blue water and gold braid run deep in our family …

Read the rest of Bartholomew’s essay at Kathleen, Kage and the Company.

To learn more about Worldreader, visit their site.

For more on The Hotel Under the Sand, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Ann Monn