Secrets of the Snakestone by Piu Dasgupta - Middle Grade Page Turner

🐍Secrets of the Snakestone
✒️Piu Dasgupta
🎨Cover art by Helen Crawford-White
📕Nosy Crow

Themes: 🌍Paris (set in)/ Calcutta (much talk of) 🚇Sewers 🎪Circus🩷Friendship 🔮Mystery 🏔️Adventure 👁️Heterochromia🔞Middle grade

Secrets of the Snakestone Trailer

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Incredible Debut from Piu Dasgupta

What an incredible debut by Piu Dasgupta. To repay a debt Zélie is sent from Calcutta by her Baba to be a maid yet falls into the dank, dark depths of a Paris mystery adventure full of secrets and peril. The description of the Parisian subworld of sewers is fantastic and leaves you wanting to take a shower!

When sewer worker Jules discovers a locket that belonged to Zélie’s father this unlikely duo must race against the clock to unearth the missing Snakestone and save her Baba. At every turn neither are sure who is friend or foe.

Writing Features for Learning

There’s lots of literary features that I enjoyed in the book including letters (both sent and unsent), Zélie’s monologue pep talks to her inner self and the use of riddles in the book.

Love Secrets of the Snakestone

Piu also masterly weaves fiction with factual elements and I particularly enjoyed reading about this at the end of the book.

I also adore learning new vocabulary and was delighted with the tasty new words that Piu has introduced me to. Let me see now how I will fit vertiginous into conversation!

Heterochromia

One characteristic that Zélie has is that she has heterochromia. It’s where there is different eye colour in the same person. My Nan had this – I always thought it was very cool!