Written by Sreelata Menon
Box and Map illustrations by Ishan Trivedi
Reviewed by Sujata Noronha and Anandita Rao
An entry point for a curious reader seeking discoveries of lost cities
| Publishing Date: 2025 ISBN: 978-93-5731-874-7 Page Count: 231 Publisher: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd. QBR Reviews Issue: Q3 2026 Categories: Archaeology | Discovery | History | Mystery |
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This book is a collection on lost cities across four continents – which may explain the use of the word ‘world’ in the subtitle. The cover image intrigued readers, especially the mirroring effect, but it also belied their expectation of discovering that not all lost cities are under water, as implied by the fish swimming across the image. The book presents as a mix of non-fiction, speculative fiction and mythological references, rendering it a text that would be difficult to shelve in a library, for starters.
As a non-fiction, informational text written in narrative style, the Contents, Endnotes, references, timelines, glossary, maps, photographs and an index all become critical aspects for young readers. We examined some of these with readers. The Content of the lost cities (36 in number) listed come from a long, scattered time period, and readers needed to be reminded about this as chronological order is not maintained in the order of reading. Additionally, some of the alleged lost cities are still being discovered, and this also added to some befuddlement. The Contents attempts to locate all this in a short Introduction titled ‘So, what on Earth are “Lost Cities”?’ While the tone and style lay out some excitement about discovery, puzzle-solving, and sense-making from artefacts and digs, the chapter ends with questions on what happened to these cities, and, surprisingly, each chapter thereafter does not quite answer these questions. A reader wondered if some reference to where to look, where to read more, find out more would have helped.
The Back Matter of the book has a listing of Archaeological Nuggets, a Select Bibliography of texts that an adult reader may turn towards, Acknowledgements and image copyright information. Flipping through the Front Matter brings to mind the many considerations that publishers have to honour when putting a book like this together. There are some facts that include an attempt at citations, but not all statements are verified. There are some photographs of artefacts and people that are captioned in italics and quotes, and every chapter ends with a location box for present-day geography and time period. For reasons that we are trying to understand, publishers imagine that all readers need images, so there is the use of illustrated maps before every continent, which do not add to the reading, as they are zoomed out to represent the continent while the segment of writing is about a lost city in a region/state/country. Each page number is represented within a magnifying glass that a child said should have been replaced with more archaeological tools, especially since the introduction mentions, ‘experts called archaeologists, armed with their swanky excavation tools, suddenly began unearthing…’; there was a natural curiosity to understand these tools beyond the very familiar magnifying glass. There is an insertion in a segment quite randomly placed after Chapter 28, titled ‘Meet the new tools on the block’. Readers were fascinated by this list, and it reminded us about the potential of placement, arrangement, ordering of information in a book like this.
Scattered throughout the book in what we imagine is a paper-saving approach, there are 3 information boxes that drew readers’ attention. These short information text boxes range from ‘What is a Civilization’ (Pp 132), ‘Some misconceptions about archaeology’ (Pp 144) to ‘Meet the new tools on the block’ (Pp 189). We are tempted to lay these poor decisions on placement and arrangement at the feet of the publishing team rather than the writer, but, as a whole, the book becomes untidy and incoherent.
On opening the book and looking at the Contents, one realises that the continents are arranged alphabetically, and so India, which is promised in the subtitle, does not feature in the Contents at all, but is under Asia by way of many lost city names.
There are, however, at least 20 of the total of 36 cities that have traces in present-day India, so the book could have been organised differently or the title remains a misnomer. What surprised adult and younger readers is how much more there is to understand about the past, beyond the textbook reproduction of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa that we were vaguely familiar with. After reading a number of chapters in the library, some of our readers noted that they preferred the textbook style of writing to this book because the facts are not neatly and clearly presented. We are reminded about Louise Rosenblatt’s argument on efferent reading and reader response.
Sreelata Menon invites us into the lost cities of Dwarka (Gujarat), Hampi (Karnataka), Mamallapuram (Tamil Nadu), Nalanda (Bihar), Muziris (Kochi) and Poompahar (Tamil Nadu) as well, but what the book could have also done is complicate our origins if it possibly included the find of Keezhadi (Tamil Nadu). We wondered why this incredible lost city was missing in the book. We feel it would have enabled the writer to provide readers with an alternate origin, and a very possible one, emerging from findings that we are not ‘actual descendants of ancient Harappans, now spread all over the Indian subcontinent’ (Pp 176) but that many of us might likely have Dravidian origins emerging from findings on the Keezhadi site. In a time of homogenisation, a book like this had the potential to decentralise and disrupt, but it falls short of this possibility.
Sreelata Menon is described as a writer who ‘not only introduces children to the rich cultural and historical heritage of our inherited past, but also to inspire and tickle their fancy with magical stories from the ancient and famous mythologies.’ She also self-describes as a history buff and writes on anything and everything. We felt this is a true description because there are many statements within the book that could be anything and/or everything. Reasons for cities to be lost are explained in broad speculative terms of climate change, unknown disasters, war, migration, flood and such. The fact that these disappearances may have been over time is not explicitly stated. Each title includes a subtitle that refers to the reason, but these are speculative in the chapter. Some examples are:
Chapter 26, Rakhigarhi: When civilization simply spread…;
Chapter 22, Mohenjo-Daro: When river levels rise, or disease spreads…;
Chapter 17, Nagarjunakonda: When progress destroys history…
The writing style is very conversational and possibly imagines that the writer is in direct contact with readers, which sets this kind of informational text apart. For example, in Chapter 24,
Kalibangan: When rivers dry up…, the text reads like this:
Then suddenly there’s an earthquake – maybe some horrific landslides and massive floods.
And just like that, your home is lost.
The river that was once your lifeline is now a trickle, choked by stones, rocks and pebbles.
Your grazing pastures are no longer green and flourishing.
…
What do you do?
You go in search of another home.
So do your neighbours.
All of you now move to a safer place to start life all over again.
In attempting to maintain an intimacy with the reader and move between first, second and third person, the writing flattens our understanding. Did the people of Kalibangan, who lived between 2500 BCE–1750 BCE, think in terms of individuals – neighbours and such? When we write of floods, would there have not been immense loss of life – human and animal? Why are aspects of this kind erased from the telling? In not a single chapter does one find evidence of what may have been horrific pain and loss. We wonder if there is an imagination that the young reader should be shielded from all this? Flattening out non-fiction information is often likely to disappoint and disinterest the reader who is seeking reliable facts as well as glimpses into the past from reading.
There are parts of the telling, while exciting, leaped across logical time frames that resulted in readers needing mediation to understand.
An excerpt from Pp 116 on Nagarjunakonda is here:
For six years – from 1954 to 1960 – the ASI dug and they dug.
They tirelessly excavated to salvage and save whatever they could.
And what a treasure trove it turned out to be!
The text goes on to share about finding Buddha’s tooth and a strand of his hair as well as remnants of almost thirty-odd monasteries. The segment then concludes:
The Nagarjuna Sagar Dam was the largest and the highest masonry dam in the world at the time.
Sadly, it came at the cost of almost a 100 sites of our ancient heritage that included astonishing relics of the Stone and Medieval Ages.
As we close this text and deliberate about holding it on the library shelf, we are reminded of a distinction that presents itself to us from writing for children in India. What imagination do writers hold about the minds of children? How do they imagine their books will be read? In Search of Lost Cities is possibly going to be picked up by a curious child as the writer imagined, but we are not convinced that a curious child will wade through the messiness of the arrangement and time lines of the book in one sitting. In discussing further reading with children, there was a fatigue after two or three chapters for some, and while an older reader who was 14 years old found the text ‘reasonable’, she was clear she would not read it on her own, and a younger 11-year-old found the text to be talking to a reader who is 8 or 9 years old in tone and said he was not interested. So, we did wonder if there was any thinking about the reader and reception to the text.
In the library, we think that this book may serve a purpose of allowing a curious reader a soft entry point into the archaeological finds and only that. If it has to do more, it needs the mediation and planning of a library educator/librarian/teacher/parent to elevate it further and support from additional reading material and other texts.
Other Books
- A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexican Word Painters by Duncan Tonatiuh, Abrams, 2022.
- Ancient Indians: The Amazing Story of Our Early, Earlier, Earliest Ancestors; The Kids Edition of the Mega Hit Early Indians by Tony Joseph and Devika Cariapa, Juggernaut, 2025
- India: A Story through 100 Objects by Vidya Dehejia, Roli Books, 2021
- India through Archaeology: Excavating History by Devika Cariapa, Tulika Books, 2018
- Nalanda: The Untold Story by Yuvraj Malik, National Book Trust, India, 2025
- Submerged Worlds and Other Amazing Stories of India’s Mighty Rivers by Vaishali Shroff, Penguin Random House India, 2025
- The People of the Indus and the Birth of Civilization in South Asia by Nikhil Gulati (with Jonathan Mark Kenoyer), Penguin Books (Penguin Random House India), 2022
- The Story of the First Civilizations from Mesopotamia to the Aztecs by Subhadra Sen Gupta, Talking Cub (Speaking Tiger), 2021