Reviews

Imagine a multi-volume fantasy series with mages, magic, dragons, pixies, spells, prophecies and a great evil. Now imagine that only the last book of this series exists. That’s what Carry On is. If that’s not all, it is also the author’s retelling of a fan-fiction written by a character in her previous novel, Fangirl If […]

Bartimaeus, the irascible, cheeky, footnote-loving djinn, first made his appearance in Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand, and subsequently went on to star in three other books in the series. The story of Bartimaeus’ years with the young magician Nathanial (John Mandrake) and with Kitty Jones, variously enemy and ally, spans the first three books […]

How do you sum up India in a single volume? Is it even possible? Veena Seshadri and Vidya Mani take up the challenge in a volume called India A to Z: An Alphabetical Tour of Incredible India, a “bumper infopedia… packed with fascinating facts, terrific trivia and colourful cartoons on just about everything in India”. […]

What do you do when you wake up one morning and find that your mother has left you all? If you find she’s packed her bags, left a succinct note on the fridge and disappeared from your life. Would you be angry, feel betrayed, be heartbroken? Maria Sulaiman is all of this and more, as […]

Rebus is back on the force—but he’s now junior to Siobhan Clarke! Well, if that piece of news makes you sit up in disbelief, you must be a fellow-Rebus-fan. Which also means you need to pick up the nineteenth Rebus novel, The Saints of the Shadow Bible, right away. This one is a slightly mellow […]

Satire is never easy and satire for young adults would be an especially tough choice. Add to this the fact that Mike Masilamani references the Sri Lankan civil war in his The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers, and you realize what an uphill task he’s set himself. In the story, which is vividly illustrated by […]

‘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 […]