The Puffin Book of Classic Stories for Girls was first published in 2010. Its title is misleading and yet not, depending on what you understand by ‘stories.’ These are neither original stories nor all short stories nor all of them written originally for girls or even for children in general…
The Storyteller: Tales from the Arabian Nights is a pretty good version of the Arabian Nights for children. It has some of the not so well-known stories in it such as ‘The King and the Physician Douban’ and ‘The Diamond Anklet,’ as well as well known ones, tailored for child readers. The familiar but very long story of Aladdin has been broken…
The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhandar the Iron Man and Other Stories has four terrific stories. ‘The Giant of the Bakery’ is about Molka the Giant, a fantastic baker. He comes to ‘a nice little town by the sea which is neither too noisy, nor too quite, and had neither too many people, nor too few,’ a perfect little town to start his own bakery…
When Ritu goes shopping in an ordinary mall in an ordinary city on an ordinary day and takes a perfectly ordinary elevator to the lowest floor, the last thing she expects is to step out into the Underground Forest. Trapped in this gloomy Forest, Ritu meets the Resident Magician, Serendipitous, and his assistant, Blanc-Noir…
Once again I have a bundle of books to review for the Children’s Special issue of TBR. Once more the books have nothing in common. There is no unifying theme, no single target group. When publishers are regressively dividing readers according to gender (pink books for girls; action books for boys), it’s great to have a bunch of books…
Faces in the Water is a fascinating tale for young adults dealing with the subject of female infanticide. The author has dealt with this sensitive issue in a very gentle manner coated with humour which makes the book interesting. In about 200 pages Ranjit Lal weaves the story of an atrocious crime that has been existent…