Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Written By Linda Malek

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara

Reviewed by Mimi
📒📒📒📒

This was an utterly harrowing read. Deepa Anappara has given a name, a personality and an identity to the missing children of India with this novel. Through the eyes of the children who undertake a search to find their school friends, we experience a loss of innocence that truly breaks your heart. The fear in the community, the lengths people go through to survive and the sense of injustice experienced through Jai and others makes for a novel with real impact. The detective element to the story keeps the pace throughout but the realisation towards the end of how this will end made me want to stop the kids from looking any further.

It was stark to me how these children were forced to have such adult experiences so young. How the society they lived in let them down. How lawmakers were uninterested because of their supposed powerlessness. They went from children to adults in very short space of time.

It is wrong to describe this as an easy read because whilst the prose keeps you going and the crime-solving element is intriguing, I had to keep reminding myself that these were children going through this and not adults.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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