Quill & Quire

With her latest tale of courage, determination, and success in overcoming hardship, Mahtab Narsimhan reminds us that, sometimes, all you need to engage young readers is a really good story. The Silver Birch Award–winning author (for her debut novel, The Third Eye) transports readers into the frenetic world of the dabbawallas of her native Mumbai, who deliver lunch to white-collar workers in metal containers called tiffins. Against this backdrop we meet Kunal, who is on a quest to find his birth mother using the tiffins as a tool. It sounds fantastical, but Narsimhan’s lush rendering of Mumbai is so vivid the reader can almost hear its sounds, see its sights, and smell its scents. In her starred Q&Q review, Shannon Ozirny wrote that “this world will be just as awe-inspiring to North American young people as any fantasy realm could hope to be.”