By Sayantani DasGupta
On her twelfth birthday a New Jersey sixth grader finds out the Bengali folktales her parents told her were the truth about her own life, and that she is the princess in them.
Kiranmala's parents have spent twelve years telling her she is an Indian princess, and she has spent twelve years being embarrassed about it. Then she wakes up on her birthday and they are gone. In their place there is a rakkhosh, a demon the size of her kitchen, and it has come to eat her. Two princes turn up at the door insisting they are the rescue, and within a chapter Kiran is out of Parsippany and into the Kingdom Beyond, a place with winged horses, maps that argue with you, a moon that is a person, and a serpent king who wants something from her she does not understand yet. The folktales were not folktales. They were a briefing, and nobody told her.
Your child has met the Greek gods. They have probably met them three or four times by now. This is a whole mythology they have never seen, and Sayantani DasGupta is Bengali-American writing the Bengali stories she grew up on, so it arrives with the confidence of somebody telling you about their own family rather than doing research. It moves fast and it is funny in a mouthy, wisecracking way that a Percy Jackson child recognizes immediately. And Kiran is a good companion for a child who does not feel brave: she is scared through most of the book and does it all anyway, out loud, complaining the whole time.