A 2024 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection

A 2024 ALA Rise: A Feminist Book Project Titles Selection

In I Kick and I Fly, Ruchira Gupta has given young readers an irresistible story, and also one that could save lives. This book is a gift. -- Gloria Steinem

A propulsive social justice adventure by renowned activist and award-winning documentarian Ruchira Gupta, I Kick and I Fly is an inspiring, hopeful story of triumph about a girl in Bihar, India, who escapes being sold into the sex trade when a local hostel owner helps her to understand the value of her body through kung fu.

On the outskirts of the Red Light District in Bihar, India, fourteen-year-old Heera is living on borrowed time until her father sells her into the sex trade to help feed their family and repay his loans. It is, as she's been told, the fate of the women in her community to end up here. But watching her cousin, Mira Di, live this life day in and day out is hard enough. To live it feels like the worst fate imaginable. And after a run-in with a bully leads to her expulsion from school, it feels closer than ever.

But when a local hostel owner shows up at Heera's home with the money to repay her family's debt, Heera begins to learn that fate can change. Destiny can be disrupted. Heroics can be contagious.

It's at the local hostel for at risk girls that Heera is given a transformative opportunity: learning kung fu with the other girls. Through the practice of martial arts, she starts to understand that her body isn't a an object to be commodified and preyed upon, but a vessel through which she can protect herself and those around her. And when Heera discovers the whereabouts of her missing friend, Rosy, through a kung fu pen pal in the US, she makes the decision to embark on a daring rescue mission to New York in an attempt to save her.

A triumphant, shocking account inspired by Ruchira Gupta's experience making the Emmy-award winning documentary, The Selling of Innocents, this is an unforgettable story of overcoming adversity by a life-long activist who has dedicated her life to creating a world where no child is bought or sold.

A nail-biting journey and a vivid portrait of the power that binds families together, The Freedom Seeker is the story of one girl who has to battle political shifts and navigate the darkness in both India and the United States in order to reunite her family, by renowned activist and award-winning documentarian Ruchira Gupta.

Twelve-year-old Simi Singh has grown up with loving parents and grandparents in her town in Northern India. Her life is marked by school exams, hockey competitions, and Diwali and Id celebrations. Until now, her only worries have been winning the next hockey championship, getting better grades than her best friend Ravi, and of course--avoiding the comments that her class nemesis, Ashok, make at her expense.

But one night, as a rock crashes through the window of her family's Id celebration, and as her family reads the note wrapped around it, everything changes. The silence brings their celebration to a halt. Simi realizes that something very bad is happening. And life will never be the same.

A vigilante group against inter-faith marriage is targeting her Hindu Sikh father and Muslim mother. And in the face of mounting violence, they must choose whether to separate or leave India. When her father decides to flee the country, Simi's once peaceful world shatters into a million pieces. In a terrible twist of fate, by the time Simi's father applies for family reunification, the US policy on political asylum has become stricter. His petition is rejected. Desperate to escape the threats at home, Simi's mother, pays a smuggler to sneak them into the US. But when they are separated while crossing the Arizona desert--each told that the other is dead--Simi must form friendships and navigate the darkness of her current situation to find her mother who she knows must be alive...

'River of Flesh and Other Stories' brings together twenty-one stories about trafficked and prostituted women by some of India's most celebrated writers-Amrita Pritam, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Indira Goswami, Ismat Chughtai, J. P. Das, Kamala Das, Kamleshwar, Krishan Chander, Munshi Premchand, Nabendu Ghosh, Qurratulain Hyder, Saadat Hasan Manto and Siddique Alam, among others. Jugnu, in Kamleshwar's 'River of Flesh' ('Maas ka Darya')-stares at a lifetime of servitude as age and disease take hold; Ismat Chughtai creates the unforgettable character of Lajo in 'The Housewife', a carefree young woman who must conform to society's idea of decency, or risk being branded a whore; in 'Heeng-Kochuri', by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, a boy growing up near a red-light area discovers the adult world of patrons, connoisseurs and customers-as well as savouries offered to young boys as bribe; and in Manisha Kulshrestha's 'Kalindi', a son looks in through a window and his life falls to pieces around him. An unprecedented anthology-for its subject, as well as for the range of authors and translators who are part of it-'River of Flesh and Other Stories' offers a harsh indictment of this practice of human slavery, too often justified-and occasionally glorified-as the 'world's oldest profession'.