Review #45: Carry On

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 […]

Reviews #43 and #44: Golem’s Eye and Ptolemy’s Gate

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 […]

Review #42: India A to Z

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”. […]

Review #38: Gender Talk

‘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 […]

Review #36: The Whispering Skull

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. […]

Review #35: Smitten

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 […]