An insightful and uplifting memoir about a young Haitian woman in post-earthquake Haiti, as well as the profound, life-changing impact she had on one journalist’s life.

In January 2010, a disastrous earthquake struck Haiti, killing thousands of people and paralyzing the country. Catherine Porter, a recently minted international reporter, was on the ground in the immediate aftermath. Moments after she arrived in Haiti, Catherine discovered her first story. A ragtag band of volunteers told her about A Female Named Lovely: One Child’s Miraculous Success and My Journey to the Center of Haiti about a “miracle kid”—a two-year-old lady who got survived six days beneath the rubble and surfaced virtually unscathed.

Catherine found the girl the next day. Her family was a secret; her potential uncertain. Her name was Lovely. She seemed a symbol of Haiti—both hopeful and despairing.

When Catherine found that Lovely have been reunited with her family members, she did what any journalist would do and followed the storyplot. The cardinal rule of journalism is to remain objective and not become personally involved in the stories you report. But Catherine broke that rule on the last day time of her second visit to Haiti. That day, Catherine made the easy decision to enroll Lovely in school, and to shell out the dough with money she and her visitors donated.

Over the next five years, Catherine would visit Lovely and her family seventeen times, while also reporting around the country’s struggles to harness the international hurry of aid. Each trip, Catherine’s romantic relationship with Lovely and her family members became more involved and more complicated. Trying to stability her instincts like a mom and a journalist, and more and more conscious of the expenses involved, Catherine discovered herself attempting to align her worldview with the realities of Haiti following the earthquake. Although her dual jobs as donor and journalist had been constantly at odds, as one piled up expectations and the various other documented failures, a third role had emerged and quietly become the most significant: that of a friend.

A Girl Named Lovely is about the reverberations of an individual decision—in Lovely’s existence and in Catherine’s. It recounts a journalist’s voyage into the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, strike by the best natural devastation in modern background, as well as the fraught, messy realities of international aid. It is about hope, kindness, heartbreak, and the moderate but meaningful difference one individual can make.