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A review by seshat59
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
4.0
4-4.5 stars
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is fantastically written book. It took a little while for me to buy in, but once I did, I was hooked.
Told mostly from nine year old Jai’s point of view, this is anything but a children’s novel. (In this way, it kind of reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Instead, using children as narrators, the Reader can read between the lines with better clarity and fully understand events and their horrific magnitude, even through Jai’s shield of innocence.
Children begin disappearing from Jai’s neighborhood. He lives in a slum in an unnamed Indian city in the shadow of many high rises, which are home to well off Indians of a different caste. Jai, who has watched a great deal of crime solving television, fancies himself the natural person to investigate the disappearance of his classmate. Enlisting his friends, Pari (who is determined to study her way out of the basti) and Faiz (who is Muslim and has to work to supplement his family’s income), the trio begin “detectiving” and trying to make sense of events and locate the missing children as well as their human or possibly djinn captors. What was initially one disappearance multiplies and apparently is made to represent what is often true events throughout India.
Anappari’s tone is just excellent; she’s taken her experience interviewing Indian slum children combined with the horrific reality of children trafficking in India and created a complex novel. The characters throughout the basti are colorful and multi-dimensional. Jai’s innocence and bravado is on point. Anaparri tackles deep issues of injustice: child trafficking, caste, racial divisions and prejudices, sexism, police corruption, etc. The novel deserves its many accolades, and I highly recommend it, even if the title and introduction make you think the trains will feature far more prominently in the narrative than they did.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is fantastically written book. It took a little while for me to buy in, but once I did, I was hooked.
Told mostly from nine year old Jai’s point of view, this is anything but a children’s novel. (In this way, it kind of reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Instead, using children as narrators, the Reader can read between the lines with better clarity and fully understand events and their horrific magnitude, even through Jai’s shield of innocence.
Children begin disappearing from Jai’s neighborhood. He lives in a slum in an unnamed Indian city in the shadow of many high rises, which are home to well off Indians of a different caste. Jai, who has watched a great deal of crime solving television, fancies himself the natural person to investigate the disappearance of his classmate. Enlisting his friends, Pari (who is determined to study her way out of the basti) and Faiz (who is Muslim and has to work to supplement his family’s income), the trio begin “detectiving” and trying to make sense of events and locate the missing children as well as their human or possibly djinn captors. What was initially one disappearance multiplies and apparently is made to represent what is often true events throughout India.
Anappari’s tone is just excellent; she’s taken her experience interviewing Indian slum children combined with the horrific reality of children trafficking in India and created a complex novel. The characters throughout the basti are colorful and multi-dimensional. Jai’s innocence and bravado is on point. Anaparri tackles deep issues of injustice: child trafficking, caste, racial divisions and prejudices, sexism, police corruption, etc. The novel deserves its many accolades, and I highly recommend it, even if the title and introduction make you think the trains will feature far more prominently in the narrative than they did.