Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

When girls were married off before or at the onset of puberty and relegated to household chores thereafter, the naughtiness or irreverence that makes fictional boys so popular was denied to them. For Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, the injunction from the Manu Samhita advising parents to marry off their daughters at the age of twelve neither authorizes the perpetuation of such an unreasonable,

What is the best piece of news about Urgum: The Axe Man and Urgum and The Seat Of Flames, two brand new books about to hit the stands? Firstly, it’s a post-Harry Potter release and, unlike scores of books written for young people, isn’t a Harry Potter rip off.

The art of great story-telling lies in the ability to retell a worn-out old tale—but in a style that is delightfully engaging, maintains its grip on one’s attention, and it only gradually dawns to the reader that this was, after all, a tale s/he knew about all along.

Wilderness was given to me to review many moons ago. I read it there and then, but have only been able to write the review now. It says a lot for the power of the book, if after such a long gap, the emotions still remain strong and vivid.

Half boy, Half God. What an interesting concept. When I first heard of the series, I was dying to read it and was happy when I was asked to do the review for this issue. However, it is juvenile, obvious, over-simplified and completely a-literary. But hey, it seems to work. So who am I to pooh-pooh it?

Picture the hero, a Transylvanian vampire, subsisting on a regular liquid diet of single malt whisky. Add to the cocktail mix a temperamental Tantrika going by the name of Sinistra, for a wife, a precocious water sprite called Koral, a vetal,

The idea of taking historical events and stitching a fictional story around them is not new. But the task of doing it in a manner that will interest a twelve-year-old is a challenging one, and that is what Anu Kumar sets out to do in this book.

This entertaining book by the author of the best-selling No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series is about two boys in Africa spending time in the bush and learning about the habits of baboons. There are several other titles in the popular Akimbo series, all about different animals.

When I was a child, growing up in India during the eighties, I believed that adventures only happened to’ blue eyed children in some far off country’.