The blog
An assortment of thoughts, opinions and stories
Books I’ve enjoyed, notes from my workshops, and stories about writing, dance and travel
Leap Day
I’ve always been fascinated by leap years. Who hasn’t? Magically, out of nothingness, a day appears every four years. Where does it hide, squished between the 28th of February (a special month anyway) and…
The Writers’ Club 2019-20
I can’t quite believe it’s been five years with the Writers’ Club at St. Mary’s School. I remember we had a maths teacher in class V who had been teaching there for FOUR YEARS.…
Annexed
I was not planning to write a review of Annexed because of all the questions it raised in me about historical fiction. The Diary of a Young Girl, with its optimism and intimacy, made the Annexe come alive to…
Broken Soup
Unlike most other books that I pick up, the cover of Broken Soup did not attract me. But I’ve read and loved two other books by Jenny Valentine (The Ant Colony and Fire Colour One), so I borrowed this…
Sisters at New Dawn – The Story Behind the Story
Sisters at New Dawn – The Story Behind the Story
Everybody knows that writing a book takes time. Sometimes (is it especially so with me?), it takes quite a long time. I wrote Sisters at New Dawn six years ago. 2014. Of course, this meant that in…
International Mother Language Day
International Mother Language Day
All kinds of thoughts come to my mind as I think of the term mother language. I love the fact that so many languages exist. I love the celebration of language as both art…
Listen to the Moon
I keep saying that with Michael Morpurgo, you can’t go wrong. Once more, with Listen to the Moon, I realised the truth of that. Had it been almost any other writer, I would have been daunted by…
Ink
More often than not, fantasy serves as an allegory of the world we live in. Sometimes, the allegory is clearer than at other times, and I suppose part of that is cultural. For instance,…
Secrets of a Sun King
The first book I read by Emma Carroll was The Girl Who Walked on Air, and I loved it enough for it to have been one of the top ten middle-grade books I read in 2018. As a child,…
World Read Aloud Day 2020
Five days late, but why can’t every day be read aloud day? I happened to have a session with my Writers’ Club on World Read Aloud Day, so each of the girls chose something…
