Young readers and budding artists will be entranced by the beautiful illustrations that hit you as soon as you open The Girl who was a Forest: Janaki Ammal by Lavanya Karthik. The words have been chosen with care and are as intense and deep as they are few. It is a book for all age groups with the illustrations being an endearing, additional pull factor.
It is important for people to know about the heroes who gave their lives for the cause that they believed in, who performed the most heroic feat of all, that of their duty to their passion. Such people do not look for external rewards and are self-motivated while remaining an inspiration to generations that come after them.
Lavanya Karthik herself says that this book falls under the genre of ‘faction’. The book brings to life the thoughts, emotions and feelings of a young girl struggling to find her place in the world. The author simply and succinctly weaves, not a story, but a window into the making of a woman of substance—EK Janaki Ammal–botanist, cytologist and scientist. She uses the power of her words to combine the facts of Janaki Ammal’s life with what surely is an educated insight into the content of the discourse between father and daughter in her childhood.