Visiting a London nursery school, Vivian Paley observed the schoolchildren's reception of another visitor - a handicapped boy named Teddy, who was strapped into a wheelchair, wearing a helmet, and barely able to speak. A predicament arose, and the children's response offered Paley the purest evidence of kindness she had ever seen. Recounting similar stories of kindness by children, Paley's journey takes the reader into the different world of urban London, Chicago, Oakland and New York, and to a close-knit small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Her own story connects those of children from nursery school to high school, and circles back to her elderly mother, whose experiences as a frightened immigrant girl, helped through a strange school and a new language by another child, reappear in the story of a young Mexican American girl.