Reviews

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 […]

On the face of it, Peter James’ first Roy Grace novel, Dead Simple should be a rollicking crime novel. It is in some ways. A harmless stag-night prank—even though ‘harmless’ is a relative term when coffins are involved—goes horrifiying wrong when Michael Harrison ends up buried alive and the only people who know about his […]

Sarah Waters makes no secret of the fact that she is “writing with a clear lesbian agenda”. Thus, it is no surprise that her latest, The Paying Guests, is a story of an illicit romance set in 1920s London. When Frances Wray and her mother start taking in lodgers to supplement their meagre finances, the […]

Given the drop in the frequency of updates, it would be logical to assume that I’m being rather lazy. However, that is not true. In fact, I’ve been quite busy reviewing children’s fiction from India for Goodbooks. Two of my reviews went up in the past weeks. No. 9 on the Shade Card (Kavitha Mandana) […]

Reviewing a book by an author you’ve worked with is a path strewn with thorns. So when I started reading Kirsty Murray’s The Year It All Ended—my very own autographed copy, thank you very much—I’d decided that I wouldn’t say anything at all if I didn’t like it. But as it turns out, it was […]