Kirkus Reviews praises Fred Goes Home, a charming picture book written and illustrated by Megha Kaushik, as a sweet story that “emphasizes essential lessons about change and personal development….While Kaushik’s tale shows that moving and getting used to new things can be challenging, Fred’s experience highlights ways to make the adjustments brighter and more comfortable, particularly through cultivating new friendships.”

Kaushik knows about change; the Mumbai native grew up living across many parts of India. When she was 7, she moved from western India to the southern city of Bangalore. Four years later, she sent herself to boarding school in Ooty, another state within southern India. “I feel that moving around so much…hearing so many different languages [and learning about various] foods and cultures growing up really enriched my childhood,” she says.

Fred, the eponymous crocodile in her debut picture book, goes through profound changes when his riverbed dries up. He feels lost and “sad as can be” as he looks for a new home among the grasslands, mountains, forests, and deserts of sand. A frog helps him to embrace new surroundings and to see home as “a feeling of warmth deep inside, of happiness and joy and friends by your side.”

Kaushik’s own home was one in which her parents and relatives were avid readers and introduced her and her brother to an eclectic array of books. “One of my aunts and I continue this ritual of reading and sharing all our books,” she says.

One series that made a deep impression was Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, which her aunt read to her when she was 3. Yes, 3. “I only spoke Hindi at that time, and so she would read it out to my older brother and then translate it for me into Hindi,” she says. “Imagine doing that for a zillion pages. That was the beginning of my love for stories. I have memories even now of just being transported.

“We lived with her for two months at a time over many summer holidays. She lived in the tea estates of southern India. Surrounded by nature, she would spend hours each day reading [to] us….When I was 7 and able to read fluently on my own, I discovered Enid Blyton. I remember being in class and reading The Secret of Killimooin and being so engrossed that I couldn’t wait to get home so I could keep reading. I never looked back. I always had a book with me growing up.” Kaushik also credits this aunt, who ran a farm for many years, for encouraging the author’s love of animals.

Fred Comes Home was inspired by an incident involving her then-3-year-old son, Inman. Kaushik cannot remember what triggered her son’s distress, but the story “popped into my head as I sat with him and talking to him about his feelings,” she says. “Kids at that age have very big, adult-size feelings but very few words to help release them. We started talking about him feeling so much that he would cry himself a river of tears. Later that made me also think about the phrase crocodile tears. These concepts came together in my head, and out popped Fred Goes Home in verse.”

The concept of home looms large in Kaushik’s life, as it does in Fred Goes Home. “Home was always a safe haven,” she says. “When I had kids, I had a strong nesting instinct. I really wanted to create a physical and emotional space my kids could always come back to from their many adventures navigating life.

“Fred Goes Home, while not the first story I’ve written, is the first one I actually wanted to put out there. As a mom, so much of the book connected with me. I intrinsically believe that having a strong emotional scaffolding is the most vital and important thing you can help develop in your kids.”

The reptilian main character, she says, was inspired by her childhood fascination with the species that began when, at 13, she broke away from her boarding school to attend an experimental school in the Nilgiri forests. “It was a few teachers and about 20 kids, living in the jungle with no running water, no electricity,” she recalls. “We lived surrounded by the wild. Months would pass [when] we wouldn’t even know what day or month it was. It was here that I met [world-famous herpetologist] Romulus Whittaker, whose older son studied at our school. I remember [Romulus] walking down the path to our school with a trinket snake in his hands. He had just rescued it from a bunch of villagers who had spotted it and tried to kill it. I remember seeing that and being blown away. Even though I was such an animal lover, I…had always been told to stay away from all snakes. And here was this person holding this utterly beautiful creature in his hands. I was sold. Romulus started the Madras Crocodile Bank, a conservation center, and this was where I volunteered and fell in love with crocodiles. A baby crocodile is incredibly cute, but what fascinated me was how incredibly prehistoric they are.”

Kaushik has a picture book, The Cat Is Not a Dog and the Dog Is Not a Cat, due out in August. It is designed as two books in one, each told from the other animal’s perspective. Elizabeth Anderson did the illustrations. Kaushik has also written a middle-grade novel about a boy who goes into space to rescue his grandmother, a galactic spy.

The author hopes that Fred Goes Home’s readers will identify with Fred and, through his story, realize that they have the tools inside them to feel better in the face of big feelings. “Sometimes you just need to cry yourself a river before you realize that all the good feelings you are looking for are inside you,” she says.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based freelance writer who has been published in the Washington Post and on Vanity Fair.com.