One of the popular themes for this year in literature seems to be exploring the awful lives led by poor and deprived people in some far off place or some earlier time. I like this book because it resists the caricature of how awful everything must have been back then or there, although it deals with some grim topics.

The main character, Jai, ekes out a life in a shanty town on the edge of Mumbai which is clearly threatened by the expansion of suburban India. He has a sister Runu-Didi and a family and he goes to school. He is no more than nine or ten, scared of the djinn spirits which seem to occupy the area and, more sensibly, scared of the constant threats associated with poverty and deprivation.

The story moves forward with the disappearance of a number of children from the area and the amateurish attempts of Jai and his slightly more competent friend Pari to find out what has happened to them in the chaos of the shantytown. It's the assumption that they might have travelled into the city which leads him to travel on the Purple Line, the metro line branch serving the new developments next door. He is able to see into a completely different world.

There's nothing good about the disappearance of the children, the disinterest of the police, the assumption in the local population that bad things just happen and the absence of any proper investigations. That's just the way it is and Jai knows nothing different. And, that's a strength of the novel. There are no revolutionaries here, no reformers and no indication that things will get any better. In fact, they will probably get worse as the bulldozers move in to clear another slum to enable more development. Jai and Pari encounter some interesting characters as well as the reality of life in the shanty town conjuring up the smells, the overcrowding and the poverty as well as the occasional kindnesses. This isn't some murdering gangland just because it's poor!

The crime eventually gets solved and it makes a few headlines but the disappearance of poor children in Indian cities is not a major social or political issue so there is a bit of a stir and then things return to normal, whatever that is. Jai has grown up through the novel and in some ways it has been a brutal encounter with the adult world but perhaps he'll need that experience to shape him as an adult who survives and prospers.

And, that's it. There's no happy ending, the child detectives don't actually solve the crimes and it seems likely that the ghetto is closer to being bulldozed as a way of forgetting the crimes. Because of this, you have the feeling that this is an authentic picture, sympathetic but accepting how it is. That's also a weakness because in some ways the story simply fizzles out, the characters don't reach some exciting dénouement and there is not much to be hopeful about except the strength of human nature.

It's not a bad read but I struggled with the odd names, the Indian words dropped into the text and some self-conscious flavouring in the cooking. As a first novel trying to address a genuine social issue, well a grievous crime actually, it's worth a second look.

Really enjoyed this story, in a genre that is becoming more and more popular - told from the innocent view of a child wrapped up in a spate of local kidnappings. Some lovely characters and a really evocative description of life in the outskirts of a city in India. Didn't go where I thought it would with plenty of twists.

Jai lives in a poor slum in India. Children start going missing and he decides to investigate like the detectives do in his favourite TV shows. But Jai is just nine years old. The local police are ot interested in finding the children.

The depiction of slum life is harrowing. It has been sensitively written. Sometimes the book is a it confusing and repetitive. The story is intriguing, funny and heart wrenching. I really liked Jai and his two friends wh tried to find the missing children. The story is told from Jai's point of view. The author paints a picture of what ,life is like living in a slum.

I would like to thank NetGalley, Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and the author Deepa Anappara for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is so well written and the first half is interesting, funny and very easy to read. However towards the middle it starts to get a little repetitive and I found myself struggling through. I did finish it but found the ending completely unresolved with a tragedy I was not prepared for.

A highly unique and intelligent approach to revealing the reality of living in an Indian basti or “slum”. It is written from the perspective of 9 year old wanabe master-detective Jai who decides to enlist the help of his best friends and stray dog Samosa to investigate the disappearance of local children when the police are more interested in accepting bribes and bulldozing the area. Important and relevant topics such as race and class hatred, extreme poverty, corrupt authorities and human trafficking are all addressed in detail, but are cleverly interspersed with Jai’s cheek, charm and humour. This somehow makes them far more real and credible to me than if it was a non-fiction title revealing the same situations.
An eye-opener for sure and a well-written one at that.

A heartbreaking but also heart warming mystery story that gives a very realistic depiction of life in the slums of India. I found the book a little difficult to get to grips with at first, mainly because of the writing style and dialects, but I am so glad I persevered as this is a wonderful book that I will remember for a very long time.

I loved the setting of this book, it gives an excellent depiction of life in Indian slums. The issue of poverty is realistically dealt with. The overuse of Indian words became annoying for me, and interrupted the flow as I was reading. I think young readers, adolescents, would enjoy this book more than I did. It is very well written, however.

Whilst i enjoyed the book not being able to speak any Indian dialects I found the use of Indian words in the conversations confusing and distracting from the story. Checking the translation on kindle didn't help.
The background to life in the Basti was revealing and very much brought to life by the author, along with the tragedy of the amount of children that go missing in India each day,

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with the chance to read this prior to publication.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is the kind of story that only really shows its significance once you reach the end.
Our main character, Jai, is a rather innocent nine year old. He watches too much tv, is obsessed with real-life crime stories and plays cricket. He spends his time with his friends doing the kinds of things many nine year olds will do. Then children in the area he lives start to go missing.
Seen through Jai’s eyes as he and his friends try to investigate these disappearances, I was struck by the lack of regard given to these cases. The writer’s journalistic background may have led to this determination to write about the number of children in India that go missing, but because we observe events through Jai’s eyes we can’t help but notice the absence of action.
I found the book a little slow at times in terms of action. The description was powerful, and the story as a whole I found unsettling. I definitely felt it became more impactful once Jai’s reasons to investigate become more personal.

The story of young Jai, would-be detective in the Indian slums. In Jai's district, children are disappearing - one by one, two by two, Muslim and Hindu, and no-one has any clue as to why, or where the disappeared might be.

Jai and his friends pick up the trail, yet more and more children go missing, and soon it's Jai's own family that are affected.

I did enjoy this book, but I did feel I was plodding through it in the latter parts. The characters are fully fleshed out and constructed for you to care about them, I just felt it went on a bit long.

The Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line combines humour, warmth and wit with tragedy and deprivation: innocence and optimism with bigotry and corruption. Despite the ‘djinn patrol’ of the title, there’s little magic here.

Set in a basti, or Indian slum, where children have vanished and the police are disinclined to help, the novel follows 9-year-old Jai and his friends as they play detective to try and solve the case. It’s an incredible window on daily life in such a place – the precarity of knowing the authorities could bulldoze your home at any moment, but also the strong family and community bonds that form there. The sights sounds and smells of the basti are vividly evoked as Jai & investigate, and this immersive depiction is really well-balanced to be neither sensationalised nor sugar-coated.

The child characters are so endearing and naïve that I was a little unprepared for how dark this novel becomes by the end (I’ve since learned that the story is based on real events). The heart-wrenching conclusion really brings home some hard truths - about how poverty renders people invisible, and the way vulnerable communities are so often failed by the systems meant to protect them.

Nine-year-old Jai watches too many reality cop shows, thinks he’s smarter than his friend Pari (even though she always gets top marks) and considers himself to be a better boss than Faiz (even though Faiz is the one with a job). When a boy at school goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from episodes of Police Patrol to find him.

Shining a spotlight on the swathes of children going missing in India, this tells the story from the younger point of view - though bleak throughout given the nature of the story, their optimism fades as they're met with negligence and disaffection from the systems and people supposed to help. Brilliant writing, strong sense of place, a plot to invest in. Immersive and unlike anything else I've read.

Yes, this is repetitive in places and no the kids are not good detectives. But, this is a worthwhile book regardless of whether you have visited India or not, the depiction of slum life is accurate and harrowing and needs to be shared.

Lovely light touch to the prose, the writer is promising and will improve . In the meantime just read it !

I enjoyed this book and the perspectives from which it were written really helped the story come to life. It’s a beautiful book to give a real picture of the lives of poor families in India but the subject matter is harrowing. A much needed insight into a largely hidden world.

Thanks for letting me review this book and highlighting the reality of these issues.

Jai is nine years old. He lives in a slum in the shadow of high rise (hi fi) apartments in an unnamed Indian city. He goes to school; his family has food on the table; he is addicted to crime documentaries on TV. He is on the cusp of leaving childhood as he has an emergent adult awareness of the perils and opportunities around him.

So when an unloved classmate goes missing, Jai rounds up a posse of friends and embarks on detective work to try to trace him. Gradually more children disappear, but still the police aren't interested - what are poor lives worth anyway?

Jai is mostly used as a witness to report on life in the slums. He provides a lens through which to see the emergent middle class and the way they suck the oxygen away from those still living in poverty. He shows the slums as a world with its own commerce, its own rules - one that defines its identity from the purple metro line on which its residents cannot afford to travel. People in the slums still have ambitions and aspirations of one day joining these middle classes.

And needless to say, Jai is not a great detective. This is not The Red Hand Gang or Scooby Doo. Kids with no money and no influence do not unmask villains through finding clues. But their dogged determination can eventually stir the authorities from their torpor.

Purple Line is a very bleak novel and it is clear from the outset that for most of the families - for most of the disappeared kids - this is not going to have a happy ending. Rather, they each offer a different story, a different facet of life in the neighbourhood. Despite the context, and despite the poverty, most of the stories involved playing and laughter. But always with the spectre of child abduction lurking in the background.

As well as the characters, a key strength of the novel is the sense of place. Whether in the residential area, the bazaar or in the city station, the writing transports the reader to a real and immersive world. This is all the more impressive as the city is clearly an amalgam of different cities and locations throughout India.

This is not a quick or easy read. It is very rich and dense; there are details that are important but easy to miss - I found myself constantly having to flick back a few pages. Perhaps also the overall lack of plot development can make the middle section feel a bit slow - and inevitably some stories appeal more than others. When the ending comes - and eventually it does - the pace picks up and it becomes much harder to set the book down.

This is a worthwhile novel that, like some other recent works from Commonwealth countries, deals with poverty in a modern world that interfaces with mod-cons and mass-communication. It's not a misery novel. In her Afterword, Deepa Anappara explains that she did not want to portray the kids and their families as Victims (with a capital V), but instead to represent the vitality, humour, schemes and scams she found in her encounters with kids in impoverished circumstances. Together, of course, with the lack of basic security that India's poor face on a daily basis; the threat of physical harm on the one hand and the threat of bulldozers on the other.

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What an interesting premises this book has. It follows a nine year old boy Jai and his friends who play detective to in the hopes to find children who go missing from the Basti where they live.

I really couldn’t wait to read this book when I saw it on NetGalley. It started off really interesting and I even learnt some interesting facts while reading. I really enjoyed reading the story through the eyes of a child and thought the language used was really good.

But sadly, as the book progressed and more children started going missing, the story became too repetitive, and the same things kept happening. The children would try to investigate and nothing would come about from it. It was at this point I really struggled to stay engaged.

Even though I struggled with the story I thought the characters were good. They felt realistic and I was really rooting for them to be successful in way while carrying out their investigations.

Unfortunately, this debut novel didn’t work for me, in all honesty it felt a little childish and it would be better aimed at a younger audience rather than for adults. Having said that I think I may be in the minority who didn’t enjoy this book.

It took me a little while to get my head around the way the book was written and to understand the rhythm of the language but once I did it added to the atmosphere of the story. Told from the point of view of Jai, the mystery of the missing children is interwoven with everyday life in the basti and gives such a clear vision of the unfairness of life for a group of people. It is thought provoking and heartbreaking in turn and the acceptance of injustice from almost all the characters make the harsh realities of their life all the more stark.
Well worth reading, it will stay in my head for some time to come.

Journalist and author Deepa Anappara draws our attention to the horrors and tragedy of the terrifyingly enormous numbers of children that go missing in India, a matter that is largely met by indifference in mainstream Indian society. The impoverished slums and community are depicted with an astonishing vibrancy as the people go about their daily lives and the challenges they face, lying within sight of the wealthy and powerful to whom the poor are invisible and a blight on their landscape. Annappara provides a pertinent social, political, cultural and economic commentary on modern India, with its huge wealth inequalities, class, sexism, crime, police corruption, abuse, exploitation, and religious tensions and divisions. Interspersed within the narrative are the folklore and superstitions that abound in the community, such as the Djinns.

Jai is a poor young 9 year old child, who is obsessed with TV crime drama shows, so when his class mate Bahadur goes missing, he wants to emulate those shows by investigating. He is assisted by the brighter and smarter girl, Pari and his friend, Faiz. In a narrative that brings danger and goes around in circles as more children disappear, their investigation comes far too close to home for Jai on a case where the grim realities of contemporary India bring a loss of innocence and underline an absence of all of a childhood should be, safe, secure and protected. This is a harrowing and desperately heartbreaking read of a national tragedy where there are rarely any happy endings. A brilliant novel that highlights such an important and urgent issue in India. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.

This story was sad, but well written in the sense that I learned a lot about India's slums. It's told from a 9 year old child, who's acting like a detective after kids start getting lost in the slums. It shows how complicated life is with a lot of obstacles in India. It's an eye opener.

Thanks a lot to NetGalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately there was no hook to gain my interest from the first page/chapter. I had to give up early on in the book. I am sure it will appeal to many readers but it is not for me. Sorry.