The picture book by Shruti Rao and Sahitya Rani is wholly disappointing. The grandfather here, ‘Thatha’, is the young narrator’s best friend, and they go off on imaginary adventures every day. Hackneyed plot apart, there is no coherence to the book as it unfolds—each page has a rather strained verse about something entirely unrelated to either the previous or succeeding pages.
November 2022, volume 46, No 11