At first glance, the book resembles those old classics retold, with its dark green cover and title in a narrow black box. But the dimensions and the picture on the cover make it different. The tagline suggests it is part of a series. This bodes well because we don’t have too many good series for young readers.
Duckbill Books’ Not Our War (NOW) series is just what Indian young adults need. The series, in the publisher’s words, ‘deals with children growing up in times of conflict—powerless, vulnerable, and yet, against all odds, brave and hopeful of a better future’.
‘My name is August. I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.’ A usual middle school life has fights, punches, suspensions, bullying, name-calling, dating, pranks—but when August Pullman a boy who loves ice cream and plays Xbox like any other kid goes to school, we see the true colours of children.
Writing about the future can be fraught. It is deceptively simple to conjure up futuristic fantasies, simply linear progressions of events today. But there is a very real danger of over-reaching—of creating scenarios that just become unbelievable. Ruchi Banerjee seems to have reined in her imagination at just the right time in her novel Infinitude.
Why do crocodiles have stones in their bellies? Do you know how long they have been around on earth? Here’s a hint—an ancestor of the crocodile was so large that it ate dinosaurs! A gross but effective method of self-defence—a turkey vulture defends itself by bringing forth foul smelling vomit of a semi-digested meal.
Bad Influence is one of those books that you don’t have much faith in, when you pick it up—but once you’ve gotten past the first five pages, suddenly you’re invested in the characters and the story to such a point that you desperately need to find out what happens next, even if you have a fair idea. And that, in truth, is the book’s real success.