Written by Aparna Kapur
Illustrations by Siddhi Vartak
Reviewed by Ashwini Padwal and Jennifer Thomas
A quest of a 13-year-old girl living on an island, in which the absence of animals indirectly leads her on a journey of self-discovery and growing up.
| Publishing Date: 2025
ISBN: 9780143470878 Page Count: 224 Publisher: Duckbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House Review Posted Online: June 2026 QBR Reviews Issue: Q2 2026 Categories: Fantasy | Adventure | Mystery |
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An Absence of Squirrels is an adventurous story set on an imaginary island. It unfolds through a series of events in the life of a young girl after she notices something unusual on the island, despite everything seeming routine and mundane. Drawing on the fantastical, the author sets the story on an island called ‘Thutta’, shaped like a tooth, with one school, one railway track, a few other ‘unitary’ presences, and exactly 5,120 people. However, the reason for this exact number is not revealed and remains unexplained throughout.
The blurb describes the story as a mystery ‘looming large’ with absent animals, the squirrels. We learn only towards the end about why squirrels are central in this story and how the word has the power to erase memories for the inhabitants of the island.
The story revolves around Katli, a 13-year-old girl, her family, friends, and the people on the island. The author builds each character in detail, sharing information about their lifestyle as well as their emotions and behavioural patterns. While it feels intimate to get to know each character so closely, we again struggled to connect this to plot points, and wondered whether so much character description was necessary for the story.
The characters are varied and distinct from one another, introduced as and when needed to carry the plot forward. Some characters who seem likely to play an important role early on do not necessarily do so as the story progresses. They appear loosely woven into the narrative, and not all are tied back to the resolution or the plot.
The world-building is achieved through the setting of the isolated island and the presence of magical elements. Yet the representation of characters, their everyday lives, and references to food, objects, and games all point to a specifically upper-middle-class, urbanised Indian context. The railway system, school, library, radio, and parks closely resemble a realistic urban world. The children depicted are mainstream school-goers. It seems as though the same social structure has simply been transported into a fantastical setting.
An important dimension of Katli, the main character, is her emotional personas. Katli has seven versions of herself, which she has developed as a coping mechanism to deal with different people and situations, to fit in, avoid conflict, and ward off the fear of being disliked. As the story progresses, we witness her simultaneous quest for external and internal resolution.
The character of Abhay, Katli’s best friend, also plays an important and steadying role in the story. The relationship between the two, their dialogues and the comfort they offer each other, is warm and reassuring. While her relationships with other friends reflect different teenage phases of friendship and conflict, Abhay’s friendship, with its ups and downs, can feel somewhat clichéd and at times overly idealistic. One possible inconsistency is the ease with which Katli gets along with Abhay while finding it so difficult to manage relationships with almost everyone else, including her parents. Whether this is intentional on the author’s part is left unclear.
The author has made a deliberate effort toward inclusivity in sketching character identities and assigning names. The names represent a mix of Christian, Hindu, and Muslim communities, though the majority are Hindu. Some names are foreign or creatively invented, Mr Echtu, Inku, and Pikoo, for example. It is noteworthy that the librarian, Leah, is referred to with the pronoun ‘they’. This appears to be a conscious authorial choice and is a welcome inclusion, but taken as a whole, the representation feels tokenistic, as it does not prompt the reader to think any further.
Understanding the structure of the book requires some complex navigation. There is no content page, though chapters are numbered one to eighteen; some chapters contain breaks that are not separately numbered. The book includes an illustrated map of Thutta, chapter-heading illustrations ,an occasional footnote, uncommon in fiction for young readers, as well as the references to the different versions of Katli as ‘Katli One’, ‘Katli Two’, and so on through ‘Katli Seven’.
Katli’s multiple personas were not well received by our child reader either, who struggled to make sense of this coping device and admitted to simply reading on to keep up with the story. A great deal of information and description felt too lengthy to retain, so one read forward, processing little, trying to piece the story together. The child reader also noted that the passages describing each version of Katli felt long and unnecessary, and that cutting them could have shortened the book and made for a more impactful read. In her words: “Perhaps it could have been more engaging as a mystery book on its own.”
The story, however, ends well. The portrayal of an authoritarian government allows the reader to glimpse both its positive and negative sides to some extent, though the resolution remains very open-ended — in a feel-good way rather than an interrogative one. The story presents the idea of democracy subverting authoritarian power structures, but frames democracy as an ideal and utopian world. It does not invite us to question whether democracy is, in practice, far from utopian. The creative licence is not used to challenge or unsettle current privileged or dominant power dynamics, nor does the story compel young readers to imagine a way forward or critically examine the democracy they live in.
By contrast, the detailed emotional journey shown for Katli is complex and layered. Many passages explore how she is navigating a given situation — what is going through her mind at school or at home. If the reader is invited to inhabit her inner world so fully, one might ask whether a feel-good ending is sufficient or whether the resolution could have been more layered. Katli’s personal story and the central mystery also seem to lack a direct or obvious connection. Her arc did not require a fantasy world to reach its resolution, nor did the fantasy elements offer a distinctly different social worldview.
The story demands considerable effort from the reader to follow and absorb its narrative detail, at the cost of that compulsive, hooked-on-the-book feeling, and ultimately does not leave one with strong, memorable takeaways or much to linger on.
Further Recommendations
- Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge, Two Hoots, 2023
- Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2024