At a Gaithersburg, Maryland, bookstore, Emily Bhatnagar picked out six books she wanted. “Now I have to decide which one I want most,” she told her father, whom she calls Papa.

Mike Bhatnagar shook his head with a smile. “Let’s get them all,” he said. Emily and her papa headed back to the family takeout Indian restaurant. Mike began planning the next day’s menu while Emily went to the table in a corner, where she spent most afternoons reading.

As a teen, Emily helped out at the restaurant with her mom and older brother. So in 2019, when Mike was diagnosed with stage 4 thyroid cancer, the 15-year-old was devastated. “You have to get better—I need you!” she said, hugging her dad.

Comfort

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Eileen Harlin had always been close to her mom, Julia. She couldn’t imagine life without her. So when Julia’s liver failed, Eileen donated part of her own. That was amazing enough. But the next year, Eileen stepped up again and gave her mom a kidney!

Mike began radiation treatments, most of his hair fell out and he lost weight because it became a struggle to swallow.

Emily always had a dream to attend an Ivy League school, but her grades plummeted as she had to spend so much time focusing on her dad’s health.

“I need to take some time off from school,” she insisted, and she spent months taking him to doctor appointments and pitching in more at the restaurant.

In 2021, Emily was escaping in a good book when she got an idea. If books help me, I bet they could help other kids too.

Emily logged on to her Next Door app and wrote a post to her neighbors: Reading is helping me through my papa’s cancer, so I’d like to collect old books to give to sick kids in the hospital.

That very night, her phone began blowing up with alerts.

I have books my kids have outgrown—please come take them, posted one neighbor, and dozens of others were also eager to donate.

Before she knew it, Emily had over 4,000 books, and she reached out to donate them to Children’s National Hospital in nearby D.C. The hospital replied with an enthusiastic “yes!”

Donations continued to pour in by the hundreds. Between local donations and Emily’s For Love and Buttercup Amazon Wish List, over the past three years, she’s donated nearly 25,000 books to hospitals as far away as New York City.

You gave my little girl a distraction when she needed it most, read a parent’s thank-you note to Emily.

Today, Emily’s papa is doing great. “He won the battle—just like the hero in a novel,” she says. Her college dream also came true. Now 20 years old, she is at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League School that she attends partly online, so she has plenty of time to collect books and pack them for delivery with her papa. “I’m not a doctor,” Emily says. “I can’t save lives, but I can hopefully make them a tiny bit brighter.”