Author: Payal

‘Boy or girl?’ That’s the first question that gets asked about us the moment we are born. The answer ends up dictating just about everything about our lives. Whether male or female, gender restricts us into predefined moulds. Yet most of us are unaware of these unspoken social or cultural codes that accompany our biological […]

Our—well, certainly mine—favourite modern-day ghost hunters are back. Yep, it’s Anthony Lockwood, Lucy Carlyle and George Cubbins of Lockwood & Co. fame, and this time they are on the track of a ghostly artefact called the bone mirror. Failure will mean public humiliation at the hands of the snooty Quill Kipps of the Fittes Agency. […]

Ranjit Lal’s Smitten is a difficult book to talk about. On the one hand, it will leave you repulsed and enraged. On the other hand, it is a terribly important book because it throws the curtains open on a shameful reality of our world: the sexual abuse of children. Here’s an excerpt: Samir is delighted […]

Mysteries. They are some of my very favourite books. Right since the time I read The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters as a six-year-old, I haven’t been able to resist a whodunit. While it’s true that as a cranky adult I’ve become a lot more fussy about the whydunit and howdunit too, you’ll still find […]

The reviews have been a bit scarce the past couple of months, mostly because I’ve been too busy reading. But I did review these two for Goodbooks.in: The Ghost Hunters of Kurseong by Shweta Taneja Having been part of the generation that grew up on a staple diet of Enid Blyton, one does sometimes miss […]

What do you get when you take a brilliantly imagined world and stir in a somewhat disappointing plot and a completely bizarre ending? In the case of Louise O’Neill’s dystopian spec-fic novel Only Ever Yours, the answer is, a chillingly compelling tale that keeps you hooked and horrified in equal measure. The time is the […]

Phew, this update has been a long time coming! This time it is the first in Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series, Gallows View. Banks is new to the town of Eastvale and it’s been an uphill task earning the trust of the community. And now, with a peeping Tom on the loose and an old […]

We imagine teenage love to be beautiful, fluffy, innocent and happy. We’re wrong. It’s usually messy, complicated, confusing and painful. Eleanor and Park is one such story. A couple of teenage misfits find friendship and love, first through comics and mixtapes, and then through endless conversations and each other’s company. But they are hardly the […]

How can one talk about war with children without ramming propaganda down their throats? History books don’t do it; neither does the media. Even in fiction, the plot is usually predicated around having to defeat an enemy. There have been children’s books, however, that have taken on the tricky task of breaking down the complexities […]