The Acrobats of Acra
Beatrice (Bea) – a young Scottish orphan relocated to India – joins forces with a French acrobat, an Indian servant and a circus tiger to find safety during the Indian rebellion of 1857 and, by turn, find out what has happened to Bea’s younger brother, George.
The Acrobats of Agra is a classic adventure story of bravery and friendship, filled with vibrant characters and interspersed with themes of class, colonialism and eastern spiritualism, as epitomised by Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god.
The book is written in the first-person from Bea’s perspective, and the style feels almost like real-time diary entries at times. This helps provide a fast narrative flow but at the expense of deeper character development and inner motivations. The scenes describing Bea’s struggles with learning and mastering acrobatics are well executed, but some of the action scenes felt a little lacking in suspense and urgency.
When compared to some of the preeminent books in this genre, The Acrobats of Agra falls just short, but it is still a worthy addition to the canon, and readers from age twelve and up are sure to be swept along by Bea and her friends’ odyssey.
