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© Copyright 2013 - 2025
Varsha Seshan

Gossamer

July 19, 2025 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

What a gorgeous book! Gossamer by Lois Lowry is delicately woven, pulling at your heart strings as it takes you through a tapestry of dreams, sorrow, love and wonder. Littlest isn’t sure what she is. Is she a dog? But she doesn’t have a tail! Is she human? Her instructor Fastidious never answers her questions. […]

Filed Under: Books, Children Tagged With: books for ages nine and ten, Gossamer, Lois Lowry, Middle Grade, reading, review

Gooney Bird Greene

September 12, 2024 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

Gooney Bird Greene was the second book I read from Kahaani Box, and it’s a fun story by an author whose work I admire. Lois Lowry has written such a range of books! I’ve read Number the Stars (one of my favourite reads from 2020), The Giver and Gathering Blue that I remember, and I […]

Filed Under: Books, Children Tagged With: books for ages nine and ten, books for ages seven and eight, Chapter Book, early middle grade, Gooney Bird Greene, Lois Lowry, reading, review

Gathering Blue

August 24, 2023 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

Gathering Blue opens with an unknown character in an unknown world. Sure, it is a dystopian world, but I found myself wondering, isn’t this the second book in The Giver quartet? I even went back to check that I hadn’t started reading the wrong book by mistake. I hadn’t. Yet, there were no overlapping characters […]

Filed Under: Books, Children Tagged With: dystopia, Gathering Blue, Lois Lowry, Middle Grade, reading, review, The Giver

The Giver

August 17, 2023 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

Teaching creative writing is always eye-opening. Over time, we’ve worked with mythopoeia, dystopia, fantasy, adventure, and mystery, requiring us to come up with all kinds of mentor texts and examples. During the April to June 2023 edition of the programme, somehow, we kept coming back to The Giver by Lois Lowry, a book I had […]

Filed Under: Books, Children Tagged With: classic, dystopia, Lois Lowry, Middle Grade, reading, review, The Giver

Top Nine Middle Grade Books I Read in 2020

January 3, 2021 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

I love middle grade reads, so this is my longest list this year. In no particular order, here are the books to which I gave a five-star rating in 2020. This is a book for keeps. More often than not, in India, books that address homosexuality are categorised as young adult or adult books, but […]

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Across the Line, All of Me, Eva Ibbotson, Holly Goldberg Sloan, Kate Darnton, Katherine Rundell, Listen to the Moon, Lois Lowry, Meg Wolitzer, Michael Morpurgo, middle-grade, Nayanika Mahtani, Number the Stars, Out of My Mind, Sharon M Draper, The Good Thieves, The Misfits, The Star of Kazan, To Night Owl from Dogfish, Venita Coelho

Number the Stars

September 20, 2020 by Varsha Seshan Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: Books, Children Tagged With: historical fiction, Lois Lowry, Middle-Grade Fiction, Number the Stars, reading, review