By Roshani Chokshi
Aru tells a lie she can't take back, lights a lamp she was warned never to touch, and wakes a demon who freezes the world, all right as she learns she is one of the five Pandava heroes from the Mahabharata.
Aru lives in a museum of Indian art where her mom is the curator, and she tells stories that aren't true: that she has a pool, that she spent the summer in France, that she's the sort of girl the popular girls would want around. When three of them show up on a holiday to prove she's a liar, she lights the Lamp of Bharata to scare them off, even though she's been told her whole life to leave it alone. The lamp wakes the Sleeper, a demon who stops time. Aru's mother freezes where she stands, and so does everyone else in the museum. Now Aru has nine days to find the other four Pandavas, heroes of the Mahabharata reborn as ordinary children, and stop the Sleeper before he frees the God of Destruction. Her guide for all of it is a pigeon.
It's the nearest thing to Percy Jackson going, and Roshani Chokshi wrote it knowing that. There's a god parent, a twelve-year-old who's a nobody until she isn't, the same nonstop jokes, the same quest on a clock. The difference is the mythology. These are Hindu gods and the Mahabharata, one of the longest stories anyone has ever told, and it turns up far less often on the shelf than the Greek myths do. Aru herself is the reason to hand it over. She lies because she's lonely, she gets caught out in front of everyone by page ten, and the book never lets that slide and never stops liking her either.