#504 - Champs of Devgarh

by Aditya Sharma

“Champs of Devgarh” by Aditya Sharma. Published by Puffin, the children’s imprint of Penguin. An exciting coming of age story of a group of boys, growing up with cricket, portraying life in a small town.

The boys of Star Eleven cricket team from Holy Mission School in Devgarh have only one goal on their minds. That of being the best cricket team in the town. The captain Ajay, the strategy planner Aakash and others in the team get into all kinds of scrapes while they go about chasing their goal. For the team has a mix of good as well as the bad boys of the school. They get into plenty of misadventures involving a whole lot of action and fun as they navigate their way through tenth grade in school.

Their experiences include a whole range of topics like learning importance of honesty, value of money and hard work, first love, tackling examination blues, facing defeat as well as victory. They indulge in bullying, playing pranks on their friends and teachers, cheating in exams and having fun. They are the underdogs in cricketing circles in their town. They come up with all sorts of innovative ideas to pool money to get themselves a cricket kit to improve their chances of performing better. They raise the bars for themselves constantly and aspire to win the prestigious R.P. Memorial Trophy by beating their arch rivals from the Lajpat Rai School who have been winning the championship consecutively for five years. Read the thriller of a story to know if the Star Eleven have it in them to succeed and  realise their dream of winning the tournament.

Fast paced action, the thrill of anticipation, endearing characters and settings as well as an old world charm are the highlights of the book. My 9.5 year old son found the story irresistible and wanted me to go on reading it to him. He loved the action and description of the cricket matches in the narrative. Given his recent found love for cricket thanks to the 2023 World Cup and several watchings of the movies on M.S.Dhoni and the ‘83 World Cup, the book was a perfect treat for him. He would demonstrate some of the actions described in the book as I read them for me to understand better :D He thoroughly enjoyed the scrapes that the boys got into and had a hearty laugh many a times through the story. The nail biting and thrilling match descriptions kept us at the edge of our seats as we read the book. The way the characters have been developed with realistic shades of grey is something that we loved a lot. They are far from perfect, falter, make mistakes and learn from them. At the same time they are not completely bad.

We couldn’t agree more with the author’s claim in his acknowledgments that he has been inspired by the writings of R.K.Narayan and Ruskin Bond. We felt that this was so similar to, say, Swami and his friends or Ranji and his friends in contemporary settings. The life in a small town and high school life in general has been portrayed so beautifully. When we went to Funky Rainbow bookstore for an amazing storytelling session, my son got talking to Vidya Mani who is one of the partners there. They discovered their common love for cricket, MS Dhoni and got talking about the World Cup. She immediately remembered how Rahul Dravid’s son Samit had recommended this book to her at one of their pop ups a couple of years ago. And the ever resourceful Bharathi immediately fetched us a copy of the book. Thanks a ton for this super duper recommendation Vidya. We would never have found this book if not for you!

Recommended Age

The book is apt for children aged 11/12 for self reading and can be read aloud to a slightly younger child like we did.