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TCA Avni
SO SHALL YOU REAP by Karthika Lakshmi M Children’s Book Trust, 2021, 119 pp., 80.00
November 2022, volume 46, No 11

Karthika Lakshmi’s So Shall You Reap was one of two prize winning entries in CBT’s Realistic Fiction category in the 20th Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized in 2019. The story is about an expedition by students from across India to deposit seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with narrative conflict introduced through ‘vested interests’ who seek to replace the indigenous seed varieties with genetically modified ones. The relevance of the conflict is introduced through the crop failure of an experimental trial for Bt cotton, the stress of which is implied to have potentially caused the death of a protagonist’s father.

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