Shveta Thakrar returns readers to the Night Market in her luscious new Young Adult release Divining the Leaves. The novel follows Ridhi Kapadia, a young girl struggling to find her place in the contemporary world. Ridhi would rather spend time hugging trees and wandering the forests than auditioning for the dance team and making friends. She has always yearned to become a Yakshini, and she delights in crafting perfumes based on her interaction with the natural world. Ridhi tells stories with her scents, but her teenage peers find her behaviors strange. When her family agrees to give shelter to a popular but troubled teen struggling with his own family's breakdown, Ridhi’s home becomes yet another place of conflict and isolation, driving her further into the magical forest realm.
The boy who comes to live with the Kapadias, Nilesh, finds his way into the forest as well, following a beautiful but potentially deadly being through the portal that divides the worlds. Nilesh becomes fascinated with the Night Market, the haunting fair where Ridhi hopes to sell her perfumes. Ridhi and Nilesh are at odds with one another throughout most of the book, but when Nilesh winds up trapped in the realm of the Yakshini, Ridhi must devise safe passage to help him find his way back to the human world.
Divining the Leaves is full of cultural stories and mythological enchantment, and readers interested in learning about Indian fairy tale and folklore will adore the book. The plot oscillates between real-world teen troubles and the dangers posed by magical places. Young love, family fractures, and the struggle to fit in with friends all sit side by side with enchanted transformations and the political turmoil of a faerie world. Each section of Divining the Leaves is prefaced by a story from The Tales that Trees Tell, and readers will enjoy the skill with which Thakrar weaves Indian mythology into contemporary teen life.
Divining the Leaves lifts the veil between our world and the world of magic, inviting readers to taste spring, smell stories, and listen to the meaningful rustle of forest trees. Like phyllomancy, the divining skill that Ridhi strives to perfect in the novel, Thakrar’s haunting prose and heartwarming story must be experienced firsthand, and readers will come away from the book transformed. Divining the Leaves is a beautifully written stand-alone novel that is the third installment (following Star Daughter and The Dream Runners) in Thakrar's Night Market Triptych, and it will leave you searching the tree line to find the mystical world beyond our own. I loved it!
You can find Divining the Leaves here, and you can watch my “Author Talk” with Shveta Thakrar on The Fairy Tale Magazine’s new YouTube channel here. Subscribe today!
Thank you to HarperCollins for a free copy of the book in exchange for a fair review.
Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her first novella, Selkie Moon, comes out in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/