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 with this book more than any others before, I disagree. To Night Owl from Dogfish is clearly a middle grade book. The characters, the themes, the tone - everything, for me, is middle grade. Avery and Bett learn that their dads are going to get married, and they start exchanging emails, laying plans to ensure that they don't get to know each other. They don't want two families to become one, thank you very much. They don't want to become sisters.Their fathers want to send them to summer camp together. They want to refuse to go and when that fails, they determine not to talk to each other. … [Read more...]
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 beautiful friendship bands and their chosen friends wore those bands like badges of honour, hiding them in their pockets whenever teachers were around.Today, Friendship Day makes me smile. Yes, friendship is something I treasure, and I try hard to write about. I try to give it the warmth and passion that infuses the friendship of childhood. Not long ago, a child wrote a book review of The Prophecy of Rasphora, featuring three friends - Tara, Vandana and Afreen. It warmed my heart that the review referred to the three as sisters.Friendship in … [Read more...]
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 very much. It was too tiny a problem to worry about when it felt like the world was collapsing around us. I just gave up, figuring that I would order the book again some other time.And then, out of the blue, on the 14th of June, a little over 3 months after I placed my order, I got a call from a courier company saying my parcel was at the gate. The cardboard cover was slightly worse for wear, but my books were intact!And I loved The Misfits. It was perfect in so many ways. It's the story of very real children in a very real school. We see two misfits in particular: one who tries to belong and one who realises that … [Read more...]