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Full of fast-paced action, The Moonstone Legacy equally entertains and educates, as it leaps back and forth between colonial and contemporary times, and brings alive history in a compelling manner.
● A racy adventure-thriller that zigzags between Gujarat and the Yorkshire Moors, and back again, and spans history from the British Raj to contemporary times, The Moonstone Legacy is a masterpiece of suspense that will keep the reader on the edge, as well as educate the young reader about a fascinating time and the human side of the people living in that era, which gets reduced to a dry lesson in history books.
● At its heart is a fascinating and unique building reflecting the British Indian experience is undoubtedly Sezincote House in Gloucestershire. Its architect - Samuel Pepys Cockrell - had never visited India, but took advice from the best of all possible sources. As a result Sezincote is a happy synthesis of the English country house and Mughul and Hindu architectural features, and sits in an unique Indian Garden.. The house and gardens are described pretty much as they are in real life, except that the house is moved to the edge of the North York Moors, and been provided it with a splendid Durbar Hall, the former India Office in Whitehall.
● It`s not often that the outcome of a book hinges on a moment of genuine astronomical significance, especially in children`s/young adult fiction, but in The Moonstone Legacy that is precisely what happens. Wilkie Collins` Victorian detective novel, The Moonstone, ends when a mysterious sacred diamond is finally returned to its rightful home in the Temple of the Moon in Somnath, India. `What will be the next adventure of the Moonstone?` the last line reads.`Who can tell?` Now, The Moonstone Legacy tells what happens after that! The moon`s phases, which form an important background to the unfolding of the adventure, have been meticulously plotted, so that they take place in `real time`.
● It`s rare that the heroine of a young adult`s adventure novel gets to save her friend from being attacked by an endangered animal. And rarer still that the animal in question is the Asiatic Lion, as the only surviving ones all live in one single place, Gir National Park in India. And when she discovers that her ancestor George Abercrombie was responsible for saving them from certain extinction, our heroine is suitably thrilled.
Lizzy Abercrombie is haunted by the tragedy of her mother`s accidental death on the full moon. And worse, the feisty fourteen-year-old suspects that it wasn`t an accident after all, but the result of a terrible family curse related to the mystical Moonstone from India. Determined to solve the mystery of the Moonstone, Lizzy embarks on a spine-tingling quest that takes her from Shalimar, an exotic mansion high on the Yorkshire Moors in England, to the ancient Somnath Temple in India. With her is her new friend Ravi Chandra, the most popular boy at school.Together they sidestep Lizzy`s cousins -- the scheming Sams – to uncover the shocking truth about her ancestor George Abercrombie, and try to recover the stolen Moonstone that has doomed a whole generation of her family. As Lizzie rides her way into a Bollywood movie, gets trapped in a sacred cave high in the remote mountains of Gujarat, and encounters a ruthless enemy on the dark Yorkshire moors, she realizes that she is no longer involved in just an adventure, but a race to save her life. Why is famous writer Shankar Pujari ready to kill for the Moonstone? Who will finally recover the Moonstone on the coming full-moon night? And will Lizzy survive its terrible curse?
ISBN - 9789350093276
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Pages : 276
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