Author: Payal

If you’re a reader of young adult fantasy and the name Tamora Pierce doesn’t sound familiar, I’d advise you to rectify that situation as soon as possible. Pierce specializes in fantasy adventure featuring brave, enterprising young women who want to follow their dreams. Her best known works are set in the make-believe universe of Tortall, […]

The Screaming Staircase is the first in the Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud (yes, of the hilarious Bartimaeus fame). The Lockwood series too has an intriguing alternate reality as its setting: it is based in England, but not quite as we know it. For, some 50 or so years ago, for reasons unknown, […]

How would you fare in a test of friendship? How far would you go for your friends? Are you even a good friend? These are questions many youngsters (and perhaps oldsters as well) are often called upon to answer some time or another in their lives. In Subhadra Sen Gupta’s The Secret Diary of the […]

This is the second book in Peter James’s series about Detective Superintendent Roy Grace from Brighton CID. Grace, haunted by the unsolved case of his missing wife, is hurled into a grisly murder investigation when a headless body of a young lawyer is found. Meanwhile, businessman Tom Bryce finds out the hard way that trying […]

Grief is a universal human phenomenon, something that each one of is likely to come face to face with at some point in our lives. But what is it really? A feeling, a way of being, a reaction, a strategy? Can grief be studied and mapped? Padma Viswanathan’s The Ever After of Ashwin Rao delves […]

Stoob is back, older and wiser. The carefree days of childhood are a teeny speck in the past, now that he’s in middle school! Yes, class six brings with it not just long trousers, but new responsibilities, new friends and new challenges. This is Samit Basu’s second book in The Adventures of Stoob series. As […]

The Holocaust is a grim setting to base a children’s book in and it would be fair to say that such a book would have its job cut out to get history right. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas unfortunately doesn’t. The writing is simplistic, the characters are not believable, and its location in time […]

The Maze Runner has been billed as the book every Hunger Games fan must read. As far as chilling set-ups go, this one is right up there—a mysterious glade where about 50 boys have been sent, each one wiped clean of his memories except his name. But outside the idyllic glade—where they have organized themselves […]

It was somewhat difficult not to give ourselves a pat on the back when author and columnist Nilanjana Roy called the 2014 Crossword Children’s Award shortlist ‘a triumph’ and that too ‘because none of the five books on the shortlist are earnest, preachy or are moral science lessons in disguise’. My fellow jury members, Samina […]

Samit Basu’s The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times is the first of what is clearly turning into an entertaining series. It sees Stoob and his friends hurtle into an ‘incredibly dangerous’ adventure featuring… wait for it… exams! With only two months left for Stoob and his gang to be done and dusted with junior school […]