Maru’s Marvellous Money Moves By Keamogetswe Matsho

Meet Maru Monama, a 12-year-old, Grade 7 student at Crowland Prep in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is fierce, ambitious and driven… sometimes these admirable qualities have contributed to her misadventures. Follow Maru in this modern debut novel as she navigates challenges in her friendships, family, her numerous entrepreneurial adventures, her senior year as a prefect and her complicated feelings for her crush, John. Every September, Crowland Prep hosts its annual Grade 7 Market Day and Maru and her bestie Thembi have teamed up to build the best market stall and to sell the best pizzas in record time. However, the road to the Grade 7 Market Day is filled with complex adventures that leave Maru questioning whether everything in her world is really seems as it seems. Maru envisions herself as a successful businesswoman one day and begins to cook up numerous ideas in pursuit to raise enough money for the market day at the end of the year. She and Thembi learn invaluable lessons in their first venture (selling roses and chocolates on Valentine’s Day), and the lessons don’t stop there when balancing family, school and a blooming business becomes too much for them. Maru’s Marvellous Money Moves is a pleasant read that will delight the young and old as many will relate and identify with Maru’s resilience, courage, innocence and her constant pursuit of making a success of herself, just like her mother. However, Maru’s world comes to a standstill at the end of the year when an unexpected visitor shows up at her door, threatening to change Maru’s life as she knows it.