My online creative writing programme served as the perfect excuse to get a copy of How to Be a Writer. And as I read it, every few lines, I found myself thinking, “This, exactly this!” For the first time, I highlighted sections all over the book (ebook, not physical book, just saying) simply because so […]
Giggi and Daddy and Four Others
Yes, this post is about five picture books I read last week, but Giggi and Daddy is special, so special that I think it’s probably one of my favourite picture books of all time! I bought a bunch of books at Pickle Yolk Books’ birthday sale and ah! I could read all of them over and over […]
Queen of Earth
In the author’s note at the end of Queen of Earth, author Devika Rangachari talks of Queen Prithvimahadevi’s story having been ignored by gendered historiography. That gave me pause. I’ve barely thought about that. I’ve barely thought about all the women who, most certainly, made significant changes to the course of history, but have been […]
Moonrise
I’ve been so busy working with my online creative writing programme that I simply haven’t had the time to write about all the books I’ve been reading. Two of them stand out, and one of those is Sarah Crossan’s Moonrise. This is the fourth book that I’m reading by this wonderful writer, and it seems […]
A Week of Reviews
As a writer, receiving (nice) reader reviews is always delightful. This week has been special! One child read How I Feel as part of his weekly library activity and enjoyed it thoroughly. When he found out that I was the author, he was thrilled because he’s read Dragonflies, Jigsaws and Seashells too! And that was just […]
Number the Stars
What does it mean to be brave? And how can we help one another to be brave? Number the Stars is a beautiful work of historical fiction set in Denmark during the second world war. I love historical fiction that comes alive to me. Some time ago, I wrote about ten works of middle-grade historical […]
One Crazy Summer
I took a while to get sucked into One Crazy Summer. I was intrigued, yes, both by the setting and by the characters. Yet, I needed more. I wanted to like the characters, which I could not really do–also because you’re not meant to. Delphine, Vonetta and Fern go to Oakland to visit their mother […]
Inside Out and Back Again
When a ten-year-old is forced to leave Saigon and immigrate, what would she go through? After having been one of the smartest students in class back home in Saigon, she is at the bottom of the class in Alabama. What would that be like? Her new classmates can’t understand that her name isn’t Ha, but […]
Nine Days of Spine Poetry
I’ve been fascinated by spine poetry for a while, but I’ve just been too lazy to try it out. A couple of weeks ago, I shed the laziness and began. Like all kinds of writing, I liked some poems more than others. Some of the poems were so unappealing after a couple of days, that […]
5 Times Fictional Friendship Won My Heart
When I was at school, Friendship Day was associated with all kinds of secrecy. We would hide writing boards under our desks, and make friendship bands while pretending to listen to the teacher. Friendship bands would get confiscated, much to our indignation. They came under the category of ‘ornaments’, which were prohibited. Some girls made […]
When Morning Comes
I haven’t read or studied much about South Africa, though I do remember studying about apartheid and Nelson Mandela in school. Yet, when we’re children, it’s easy to think of things as ‘long ago’. Even a year is a long time in a child’s life. Reading When Morning Comes, I realised with quite a shock […]
Flyaway Boy
What an unexpected book! I’ve been meaning to read Flyaway Boy for a while, but technological problems came in the way. I bought a Kindle edition only to learn that the ebook is not compatible with my Kindle, which meant that I had to read it on my laptop. Sitting at my laptop and reading […]
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling
I met author Wai Chim at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content in 2017. I didn’t just meet her, we were part of the same panel, called Writing About Us. She came for my book launch, a poorly attended event because I knew very few people there in Singapore, and the launch was tucked away […]
The Misfits
The story of how I got my hands on The Misfits is a tale in itself. I ordered it during the Zubaan Women’s Day sale, and it was dispatched about a week later. With the lockdown and then Nisarga, it never came. There was no way to track it and quite honestly, I didn’t try […]
The Ammuchi Puchi
I’ve been looking at books from Lantana Publishing for a while, and I want to read so many of them! The books look gorgeous and for the most part, receive glowing reviews too. When I discovered that The Ammuchi Puchi is being offered as a free ebook in times of Corona, I sank my teeth […]
Across the Line
What a powerful, beautiful book. Across the Line is one of the South Asia Book Award Honor Books 2020. I was intrigued by the title and the cover image, but I didn’t know anything about the book, except that it was South Asian, probably Indian. And the name naturally suggested to me the partition. I […]
What to Read on StoryWeaver
At this moment, StoryWeaver has 22,487 stories. 22,487. Let’s do some maths. If I read a story a day every day of my life, I will need over 61 years to read all those stories. That’s not even taking into account the fact that there will be many, many more stories by then. So, here’s […]
Crenshaw
Look at that gorgeous cover. It invited me in with all its charm, its wonder, its mystery. And the book was just as heart-warming. Jackson likes facts. He’s the kid who runs backstage and then reveals to everyone just how the magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He knows facts about bats and […]
The Good Thieves
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you cannot go wrong with Katherine Rundell. The Girl Savage, Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, and now, The Good Thieves. I’ve loved all of them. I love the poetry in the storytelling, the feisty characters and the power of relationships. Katherine Rundell’s work just […]
All of Me
It’s been a while since I wrote a book review, simply because I haven’t been reading much for the last two months. I wrote about that for The Curious Reader – about reading old favourites, but not really taking the plunge and reading something altogether new. Finally, a few days ago, I settled into a […]