Saraswati’s Way
by Monika Schröder
Intermediate, Middle School    Foster/Farrar    233 pp.
11/10    978-0-374-36411-3    $16.99

Living in a small desert village in India, Akash dreams of studying mathematics, but he has always known that his prospects for a good education are dim. And now that his father has died, he is being sent to work off the family’s debt to their landlord, breaking and shaping rocks at the man’s quarry. Thanks to his skill at arithmetic, Akash soon learns that he will never be able to pay off the debt, so he escapes to Delhi, becoming one of the many children scavenging the streets for food and shelter. Akash, twelve, is an appealing hero for this urban survival story, his mathematical talent providing him with both a superior weapon and an ambition for education that give the story focus. Schröder occasionally leans on the culture-painting a little hard, but by and large Akash does a fine job of driving the story himself, through dangerous situations and unlikely comrades, to a happy conclusion.

From the January/February 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.