Description

Eight-year-old Mishti is spending her summer holidays at her grandparents’ rambling old house in Chinsurah, on the banks of the Hooghly. There are seven mango trees in the garden. There is a fat ginger cat called Biriyani. There is a mysterious upstairs room that her dadu has told her, in a very serious voice, never to enter.

And there is, beginning on the third Tuesday of May, a Mango Thief.

Every morning Mishti finds another set of footprints in the soft earth under the Langra tree. Every morning, three more mangoes have vanished. Her cousin Tutul thinks it must be a monkey. Her dida thinks it must be the neighbour’s grandson. Her dadu thinks Mishti should mind her own business and finish her summer homework.

But Mishti has read seventeen Feluda stories, and she is fairly sure she can solve this case. With Biriyani as her loyal (if mostly sleepy) assistant, a notebook full of clues, and one extremely brave climb up a mango tree at midnight, she is about to discover that the Mango Thief is not at all what anyone in the house expected — and that the upstairs room holds a secret her family has been keeping for forty years.

Warm, funny and full of the sights, smells, and second-helpings of a Bengali summer, *Mishti and the Mango Thief* is a perfect first chapter book for young Indian readers. Beautifully illustrated throughout.