This is a good middle grade mystery with an endearing protagonist, but I had a hard time keeping a lot of the other characters straight.

There are so many reasons I love this middle-grade:
- It's deeply anchored in its Indian setting; there are no non-Asian characters.
- It does not feel exotic; Sona is relatable to young preteen girls even if their life circumstances are very different.
- Perkins does a great job of introducing difficult subjects like arranged marriages and unfair labor practices in an age-appropriate way. At the same time, this is a book I can recommend to teen readers who aren't confident in English, and they will have deeper understandings of many of the issues mentioned. They won't feel this is too young for them.
- The mystery is not too easily solved. At one point, I did guess who the thief was but I was never sure (and actually had another suspect higher on my list.)
- The story is hopeful and fun.
- The book is longer than a chapter book but short enough to not be off-putting for less able readers.

I'm always looking for good books for the global libraries I work with and this fits the bill. It looks like it will be the start of a series. I certainly hope so!

In this story, a young girl solves a real-life mystery through her courage, compassion, language skills, and smarts. It's set in the village surrounding a tea plantation in Darjeeling, India, and does a great job of introducing readers to terms and concepts from that culture in a way that is not overwhelming. Young American readers will learn about a time and place they are probably not familiar with, and will be challenged with themes including water scarcity, poverty, the effects of colonialism, arranged marriages, and workers' rights. The protagonist, Sona, is a great role model. It's not so much a cutesy mystery as a real-life situation where Sona has to figure out what happened in order to protect her loved ones. It's also a quite short chapter book so would be good for reluctant readers or a classroom read aloud.

Some gold jewelry goes missing and Sona decides to solve the mystery. The gold is the dowry that is left to her best friend, Tara, when her parents died, and has been in the family for ages. Her uncle planned to use it to get her married off to an old geezer, but Tara doesn’t want to marry him, or anyone else.

There are many suspects, and the Sona goes through the logic of who might have stolen it, and questions them.
This is an interesting sort of mystery, set in the background of a tea plantation in Darjeeling. The reader has the same clues that Sona does, as we go through each possible suspect.

The nice thing about this mystery is that while there is a deadline, and bad things could happen, and while the story holds these bad things over our heads, as the story progresses, the story resolves without any of the really bad things happening to Sona, although there are some scares.

This sort of mystery is perfect for beginning readers, because while they can be scared along with Sona, they won’t get too turned off to not want to read the story. I know when I was beginning to read, and it is true even today, if I feel there is going to be a bad outcome before the good finale, I will stop reading it.


So, good quick read. And the reader gets to learn about tea plantations, and the hard life therein.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is being published on the 7th of October 2025.