The box/set is attractive as well as sturdy. The Board Books are easy for the child to take out and put in, but hard to swallow, chew up, or tear up. Each contains a delightful collection of simple, well-known shlokas translated into readable English by Sarita Saraf and Chitwan Mittal. Arrows act as links between Sanskrit words and English translations, ingenious and accurate. For example, the book Lakshmi has the Sanskrit shloka in the Devanagari script. Below it is the English transcription or phonetic rendering. Then there follows the English translation. Below the specific, relevant words of the English translation, there are pointers or curved arrows linking them to the transcribed words. ‘I bow to you, O sweet Mahalakshmi’ comes with ‘namastastu’ below pointing to ‘bow to you’ (p. 1). In the book Shiva, below ‘O Lord Shiva, you are the lord of the mountains’, an arrow links ‘lord of the mountains’ to ‘geerisham’ below it (p 9). No italics are used, thankfully, keeping the target readers in mind.
The illustrations are bright and colourful, strapping two pages and yet not interfering with the text, cutting across, or overlapping. The children in the illustrations are also in contemporary outfits, identifiable by the readers. This may help assuring them that the gods and goddesses do not just belong to ancient times.
The books are in line with My First Prayer to Lord Ram: A Translation of Tulsidas’ Prayer that Kids can Read, Understand and Enjoy by Chitwan Mittal, Sarita Saraf and Aparajitha Vasudev (AdiDev Press, 2023). But because they are in a set, they are toys, books and library all rolled into one.
As a child, I had a couple of such sets, e.g., Pooh’s Pot of Honey (Methuen) and My Nature Library (A Reader’s Digest Mothercare Book). I treasured them, like I will do this ‘review copy’ of Shloka Books.