In 2016, I worked with Pratham Books’ Storyweaver project to commission a set of STEM books. The aim was to create fun, engaging picture books and illustrated books on various technology and engineering themes that could be used as supplementary to textbooks at the elementary level. Since Pratham works with children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, […]
Books
Review: Shatter Me
[NOTE: I feel a little bad roasting this book here, mainly because if you can’t find even one good thing to say, then should you say anything at all? But I’ve run out of patience ploughing through it, so here goes…] That hypothetical fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous? There’s a reason one […]
Book review: Come, before Evening Falls
Yesterday, at the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony in Delhi, I ran into the author Manjul Bajaj. We were only introduced to the each other just as we were leaving, but we had a nice walk down the stairs talking about a mutual writer friend, Monideepa Sahu. Anyway, I digress… Meeting Manjul reminded me of a […]
Book review: Asmara’s Summer
Is there anything more important to a teenager than her street cred? No, at least not for Asmara. So when her Canada plans are cancelled and instead she has to spend a month with her grandparents in the conservative and definitely un-posh part of town, it is instant social disaster. So Asmara does the only […]
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Lessons on turing 10
Ten years seems like an interminable period of time when you say it. Yet, the years between turning 30 and turning 40 seemed like a will o’ the wisp, slipping out of my grasp even before I felt I had a chance to get a good grip on them. Plenty happened of course, good, bad […]
Guest review: Genkaku Picasso
Writeside.net is happy to present its first graphic novel review: Genkaku Picasso by Usamaru Furuya. This is a guest review by Shweta Vachani. Genkaku Picasso is a manga, about two friends, Picasso and Chiaki. Picasso—or Hikari Hamura, to give him his full name—is an artist. After he and his friend are in a terrible accident, […]
Review: Vikram and the Vampire
Remember the Vikram and Betal stories from back when you were a kid? If you grew up in India, the chances are you’ve heard time at some point or the other. I first heard them from my grandparents, but my most enduring memory of these stories is Sunday-afternoon TV series Vikram aur Betal. I was […]
Review: Not Dead Enough
The year of reviews might be over, but (one hopes) the reviews will keep coming anyway. To start off the year, here’s Peter James’ third book in his Chief Inspector Grace series: Not Dead Enough. It seems that Brian Bishiop, a successful businessman, has pulled off the impossible feat of being in two places at […]
Review #52: Fangirl
Yep, it’s time for the final review of 2015, and the pride of place goes to Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. At its heart, Fangirl is (yet another?) teenage romance, but it would be doing it a great disservice to call it just that. This is a story of a tumultous year in the life of eighteen-year-old […]
Review #51: The Man on the Balcony
Thirty years before Henning Mankell began plying his trade as writer of Scandinavian crime fiction, there was the husband-and-wife pair of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They collaborated on a series of ten police procedural novels starring Martin Beck, a superintendent with the Stockholm police. The Man on the Balcony is the third book. Unfortunately, […]