The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright

🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Based on a true story.
Seven-year-old Chellamuthu’s life is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in India, sold to a Christian orphanage, and then adopted by an unsuspecting couple in the United States. It takes months before the boy can speak enough English to tell his parents that he already has a family back in India. Horrified, they try their best to track down his Indian family, but all avenues lead to dead ends.

Meanwhile, they simply love him, change his name to Taj, enroll him in school, make him part of their family—and his story might have ended there had it not been for the pestering questions in his head: Who am I? Why was I taken? How do I get home?

More than a decade later, Taj meets Priya, a girl from southern India with surprising ties to his past. Is she the key to unveil the secrets of his childhood or is it too late? And if he does make it back to India, how will he find his family with so few clues?

This is not a book that I would normally pick up and read. I had no thoughts about it going into it. I thought that the beginning of the book was interesting. I enjoyed getting to see what life was like in India for a family that was not well off as well as what the culture / religion was like. There were quite a few times when I wanted to yell at Chellamuthu because he was doing things that I knew would have consequences that he wouldn't enjoy. As the book progressed, my heart hurt for him and the different trials that he was forced to endure because of the actions of others. 

I think that what I liked most about this book was the focus on identity and family. How much of your identity centers around knowing where you came from? Taj goes through a period of forgetting and then remembering again. It is only after this point in the story where he feels he is whole again. It was both a devastating and touching story about a boy who was taken and who was trying to find his way home again.