Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 31, 2021 Rachel N. rated it liked it

Shelves: mystery, india, read-in-2021

Jai is 9 years old and lives in a basti in an unnamed city in India. He loves watching crime shows on television so when one of his classmates disappears he decides to investigate. Soon more children begin disappearing. My main problem with the book is that not much happens for at least two thirds of it. A kid disappears, Jai and his friends question people not learning much, the police are corrupt and don't investigate, repeat. For a mystery it was kind of boring. The book does do a good job of ...more

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Apr 30, 2020 Julie Griffin rated it it was amazing

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

By Deepa Anappara

Genre: Literary Fiction/Mystery

Best book I've read so far this year. Three young friends, Jai, Pari and Faiz, have typical elementary-school lives, going to school, fighting with siblings, dodging homework. Jai lives with his two parents and his sister, a twelve year old who longs to run track in the next big competition Their lives also include fetching water, hiking to a bathhouse, parents who work seven days a week, as they also live in one-room ...more

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Sep 10, 2020 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: novels, kids, audio, crime, setting-india

I picked this Mumbai-set book up because the premise of a small group of poor adolescents seeking the truth about fellow children who've gone missing amidst the bustling city, sounded like a good adventure, especially once you throw in the possibility of supernatural forces at work. Unfortunately, despite some vivid imagery and a few decent scenes here and there, the book never really lifts off and achieves the promise of its premise.

Yes, there is a rag-tag group of kids with requisite mix -- yo I picked this Mumbai-set book up because the premise of a small group of poor adolescents seeking the truth about fellow children who've gone missing amidst the bustling city, sounded like a good adventure, especially once you throw in the possibility of supernatural forces at work. Unfortunately, despite some vivid imagery and a few decent scenes here and there, the book never really lifts off and achieves the promise of its premise.

Yes, there is a rag-tag group of kids with requisite mix -- younger boy, older and smarter girl, Muslim boy. But that's about as far as it goes -- as children disappear from their small slum, they flail around the local bazaar and railway to try and find out what's going on. But the pacing is all wrong, there's no steady build of suspense or uncovering of information, kids just keep vanishing.

Meanwhile, various social issues are pushed forth for the reader's education -- none of which will be news to anyone with even a passing sense of modern urban India. For example, much is made of the slum being directly adjacent to fancy high-rise apartments, with the narrator's mother working as a maid in one of those. The Muslim kids in school and families in the slum are viewed with suspicion and hostility -- again, pretty common knowledge. The narrator's sister wants to run track, but her parents view that as unseemly for a girl and discuss sending her to the ancestral village. The police are lazy and/or corrupt, etc... All of this reflects the reality of modern India, but doesn't really provide any new insights or lenses to it.

Basically, the book is a laundry list of social ills of contemporary India shoved into a story that doesn't ever gain any momentum, arrives at a kind of ridiculous climax, and then peters out into nothing. After I finished it, I learned that the author spent a decade as a journalist focused on poverty and youth in India, and this very much feels like an attempt to translate what they've seen into fiction. I suppose if you're entirely unfamiliar with modern India's social ills, this is a way to learn about them, but I can't otherwise recommend it. ...more

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Aug 10, 2021 Lara rated it really liked it

A lovely book about very unlovely things. I thought the structure was very clever. It's made to look like a mystery but the "investigations" are just glimpses of different lives in the slums. ...more

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Mar 19, 2022 Astrid Lim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: asia, thriller-mystery, tragedy, culture, crime-action, e-book, popsugar-2022

Wow- what a read. I wasa hooked with the storytelling - the narrator, Jai, is a naive 9 year old, who wanted so bad to become a detective and solve the cases of missing children in his neighborhood, a slum in a city in India. But, of course, the case is so much more complex than he thought (his main suspect was a bad djinn), and opened so many worms in their neighborhood (conflict between Hindu and Muslim, wealth vs poor, etc).

This story reminds me of books like To Kill a Mockingbird- where a c ...more

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Sep 08, 2019 Tammy Grimm marked it as to-read

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