Sharon Maas’s The Lost Daughter of India begins in 1988, when Caroline Mitchell and Kamal Bhandari fall in love despite the disapproval of their families. Caroline has always been fascinated by the India she’s heard about in stories, and to her, marrying Kamal is like something out of a romantic fairytale. Unfortunately, she soon runs into the reality of life in India and struggles to cope with the culture shock, the heat and the food. Kamal leaves for a well-paying job in North India so he can earn enough to build them a house, but for now, Caroline lives with the Iyengars, a kind couple who take care of her when she finds out she’s pregnant.

While her daughter, Asha, is beautiful and healthy, Caroline is too unhappy and homesick by then to really bond with her. She returns to the States alone, revives her career, and meets another man. While she cares for Asha, she feels that Asha is much closer to the women who are raising her – Mrs. Iyengar and her daughter Janiki, who’s a combination of big sister and second mother (chinna-amma) to Asha. Kamal agrees with this, but not only is he devastated by Caroline’s departure, he realizes that he’s spent so much time away that Asha barely recognizes him. So he accepts a job in Dubai, thinking that at least he can earn enough to support her in comfort.

Which means that neither of Asha’s legal parents is in the country when Mr. and Mrs. Iyengar are killed in a car crash.

At the age of twelve, Asha becomes a maid. Mrs. Iyengar’s younger brother inherits her house, moves in with his family, and puts Asha to work. But the real danger begins when she’s sent to clean the house of a pedophile with connections to child sex traffickers who will pay well for a girl who’s pretty, light-skinned and a virgin.

This was the point at which I started to feel apprehensive about picking up a book based on nothing but its beautiful cover (it’s since been self-published with a much less attractive one), but while I won’t spoil the plot, rest assured that when Asha disappears, her parents (and other worried adults) do everything in their power to find her. The tension runs so high that I was flipping pages anxiously, and the story does end on a realistic but happy note. Speaking of realism, though, this book is pretty unsparing when it comes to the gritty and sickening nature of the child sex trade in India, and how devastating it is even for girls who are rescued – they’re possibly diseased, certainly traumatized, and definitely unfit for marriage. It was heartbreaking, especially since so many of these girls are sold into the trade by relatives, people whom they trusted to take care of them.

While this is handled with compassion and sensitivity by the author, it frustrated me that this didn’t need to have happened to Asha. Her parents essentially abandoned her, and while the story never demonizes Caroline for her choices, I still felt it was extremely irresponsible for her parents to leave her without any sort of legal safeguards in the event that anything happened to the people raising her.

On top of that, it takes two months of radio silence following Mrs. Iyengar’s death for Caroline to be worried enough to reach out to Kamal. Both of them reflect on how Asha is stiff and noncommunicative with them, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that a good way to build a warm close relationship with a small child is to live in the same country as that child. Maybe even the same house. Of course, the story couldn’t happen without them outsourcing their parental duties until their daughter’s disappearance makes them realize they need to do a little more for her than pay bills from a distance. But the setup still frustrated me, and I felt even sorrier for Asha as a result.

That said, the setting is incredibly authentic – I especially liked the detail about Asha loving Enid Blyton books as a little girl because I did, too. at that age – and I appreciate that the author allows persons of color to be both heroes and villains. So while there are parts of The Lost Daughter of India that made me fume a bit, on the whole it’s a strongly recommended read.