Ajay and the Jaipur Moon

Varsha Shah's Ajay and the Jaipur Moon is a big-hearted adventure for 9 year olds about a railway kid racing across India to find a fallen meteorite.

What happens

Ajay is about twelve and lives on the platforms of Mumbai station. He's also the editor of The Mumbai Sun, a newspaper his gang prints by hand with a roller (Saif would like you to know how much his hands hurt).

Everyone in the city wants news of Mrs Surya's top-secret space programme, and railway kids can't get anywhere near it. Then a fireball tears across the night sky. Mrs Surya announces a cash prize for whoever finds the meteorite first, plus a look inside her headquarters.

Saif, an apprentice engineer, plots hundreds of sightings on a map and decides it's come down near Jaipur. The only problem is the train fare.

This is where the book gets you. Ajay pawns his most precious thing, a gold-nib fountain pen. It's all his mother left him when she abandoned him at the station. Then he tells his friends it's safe with someone else. You'll want to shake him and hug him at the same time.

What follows is a proper chase. A man in a grey suit steals Saif's suitcase of tools on the train, and he's clearly after the same prize. The friends end up face to face with a gang of Jaipur kids who don't want outsiders on their patch. There's an ancient observatory with the largest sundial in the world. There's even a monkey who nicks Ajay's notebook.

It's very funny. Ajay narrates his own heroics in brackets (brave, fierce and lion-hearted, apparently). Saif announces he's an apprentice engineer roughly every other page.

But it's honest about how hard life is for these children too. Ajay is often living on one samosa a day. Laxmi, the leader of the Jaipur kids, has lost a finger working in a factory. Ajay also stands up to a tourist who's rude about India, which is a great scene to talk about afterwards.

If your reader loves a gang of friends who look out for each other, there's so much here. Saif's speech about wanting to build machines that change the universe is a real lump-in-the-throat moment.

What to read next

This isn't Ajay's first adventure, but it catches you up quickly. If you'd rather meet the gang from the very beginning, Ajay and the Mumbai Sun is where Ajay first dreams of running a newspaper.