Eleven-year-old Gopal lives with his family in rural India. After a bumper onion crop drives down the prices and leaves the family with little money and mounting debts, they flee to Mumbai in search of a better life. Instead, Gopal is kidnapped and sold into child slavery. He’s locked in a stifling attic room with several other boys where they are forced to glue tiny beads into intricate patterns on wooden picture frames that will ultimately be exported and sold abroad. A cruel master nicknamed Scar keeps the boys overworked and underfed, and discourages them from forming any bonds or even telling one another their names. Even so, Gopal slowly manages to gain the boys’ confidence by telling them tales at night before they fall asleep, and gradually each boy begins to reveal his own story. Throughout the ordeal, Gopal looks for an opportunity to escape, but as his bond to the other boys become stronger, the idea of leaving them behind becomes impossible. With perfectly paced, distinctive writing, Kashmira Sheth provides a fascinating look into contemporary child slavery, endemic throughout the world. By setting the story in a specific place, she succeeds in personalizing it and enriching it with cultural detail. (Ages 9–13)

For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over: We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. With the darkness of night as cover, they flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Gopal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factory job, he jumps at the offer.

But Gopal has been deceived. There is no factory, just a small, stuffy sweatshop where he and five other boys are forced to make beaded frames for no money and little food. The boys are forbidden to talk or even to call one another by their real names. In this atmosphere of distrust and isolation, locked in a rundown building in an unknown part of the city, Gopal despairs of ever seeing his family again.

But late one night, when Gopal decides to share kahanis, or stories, he realizes that storytelling might be the boys' key to holding on to their sense of self and their hope for any kind of future. If he can make them feel more like brothers than enemies, their lives will be more bearable in the shop—and they might even find a way to escape.