The Golden Monkey Mystery - Piu Dasgupta

Roma attends Miss Oliphant's School For Young Ladies where she spends her time reading and following her burning desire to become a doctor, something unheard of for women.  Whilst on a walk one day, Roma stumbles across a monkey, but not just any monkey, a rare golden leaf-eater monkey usually only found in a secret location in the Himalayas hundreds of miles away.  With no concern for her own safety, she runs into the forest to follow the monkey, followed by Birala the cat.  Roma is determined to catch the monkey in order to return it to its rightful home, but the journey is far from easy.  During the chase, she will face bandits who are on the hunt for the Snakestone, a jewel with immense power.  Along the way, she is befriended by siblings Max and Arabella, but will they prove more of a hindrance than a help?  A race across India, and a race against time, can Roma do the unimaginable and get to the monkey and the Snakestone before the bandits?

I read Piu's debut novel, Secrets Of The Snakestone, last year and instantly fell in love with it (you can read my review here) so it was with huge amounts of excitement that I settled into a train journey to London earlier this week with The Golden Monkey Mystery.  The books link together through the Snakestone jewel but follow very different paths; where Secrets Of The Snakestone is set in Paris, The Golden Monkey Mystery is set in India.  The book opens with a prologue which describes the theft of the Snakestone jewel one hundred years earlier.  We then jump to Roma who wakes from a nightmare.  Unable to return to sleep, she heads to the school library where she writes a letter to Sir Horatio Bancroft-Pratt expressing her desperate desire to attend his medical school in order to become a doctor.  From the very beginning, readers see Roma's fierce independence and headstrong nature, and it continues throughout the book.  But behind everything, I think she is lonely: she never knew her mum who died in childbirth, and her father is absent; her only friends seem to be the school cook and Birala the cat who she talks to (and who talks back to her).  I feel that she needs this adventure almost as much as the monkey needs rescuing - are they rescuing each other?

Along the way she encounters Max and Arabella who are spending the summer in India.  Max is clearly desperate for an adventure and is determined to join Roma; however, he proves very naïve.  His younger sister, Arabella, is very spoilt and seems to have spent her life getting everything she wants, which is what gets them into this mess.  An unlikely trio, the adventure is something none of them realise they absolutely need.  

The Golden Monkey Mystery is an adventure that will weave its way into your imagination and won't let go.  Amongst the action, readers will delight in the richness of the descriptions of the landscape that really bring the setting to life in all its glory.  Danger and daring combine wonderfully in this novel that is going to be an instant hit in school, and the lure of a book that hasn't yet been published will excited my students.

Publishing 15th January, The Golden Monkey Mystery is a book that is guaranteed to banish the January blues and fill readers with warmth. A word of warning though: read this when you have time to abandon everything else as you won't be able to put it down!