Daadi Maa's Diary Of Secrets - Monita Kumari - ★★

AUTHOR: Monita Kumari

ILLUSTRATOR: Yadnyee Shingre

GENRE: YA Picture Book

PUBLICATION DATE:

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: NOT A CHILDREN’S PICTURE BOOK! Officially, an illustrated story book for young adults. The textual content might work better for this age group as it gets quite dark. I found the concept as well as the implementation somewhat half-baked. It might have worked better in a lengthier work with more plot and character development.

Plot Preview:

Seven-year-old Vivek dislikes his Daadi (paternal grandmother) for two main reasons: 1. She always forces him to have raisins, and 2. She pinches his cheeks every chance she gets. But when he gets his hands on her old diary, he learns some painful truths from her past and begins to understand her better.

The story comes to us in Vivek’s third-person perspective, with some first-person interludes through Daadi’s diary entries.

Bookish Yays:

😊 The appearance of the diary entries in the illustrations, with the sepia tone and the childish scrawl giving a genuine handwritten feel.

😊 The message about not jumping to conclusions without trying to understand the other person’s point of view.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤔 Vivek is an interesting lead, especially as he is not depicted as a typical goody-goody Indian boy. However, his thoughts are somewhat mean at times, and more importantly, he doesn’t get any comeuppance for stealing the diary and reading it without permission.

🤔 The diary entries require some suspension of disbelief as it is odd to see a girl from a poor farmer’s family in Varanasi writing a diary in English. Her broken English, with multiple spelling and grammatical mistakes, is a reliable indicator of her lack of prowess with the language. But I’m not sure how I feel about a children’s/YA book having so much of the content in flawed English, no matter how indicative of the character. It also plays into some stereotypes of Indian English with the constant use of the continuous tense. (This is also used in comic shows to poke fun at how Indians speak. Outsiders don’t know that our habit of overusing the continuous tense comes from the fact that in Hindi and many other Indian languages, thoughts/emotions are always “being processed” and not just “processed.” So I *am understanding* your confusion and laughter, but it is just a side-effect of being multilingual.)

🤔 The illustrations are really lovely, I give you that. Vivek and his mother have the best expressions, and even the flashback look at India from Daadi’s diary entries is stunning. But no matter how you look at the artwork, it doesn’t seem to indicate a YA book. (See the cover art for reference. The inside illustrations are exactly the same.) Though there are illustrated books and graphic novels for this age, the artwork is appropriately “mature” in appearance. There is a great chance someone might pick this book up for their younger children and end up traumatising them. (More on this below.)

Bookish Nays:

😒 A seven-year-old main character for a teen’s book? No teen would willingly read a book with a “child” protagonist as they consider themselves too cool at this age. Either the main character should have been older or the story should have been modified for younger eyes.

😒 The GR/Amazon book summary has two sections: a brief blurb and a detailed description. The latter does mention the whole story with possibly triggering content, but not everyone will read that lengthy section. I read only the short blurb and was caught unawares by how tragic the story became. There are two characters’ deaths, one of which is depicted on the page via a flashback. Though the scene isn’t gory, it is still jarring to see such innocent illustrations depicting brutal death.

😒 I don't know how to feel about the whole ‘pinching of cheeks’ idea. If a child is uncomfortable with any kind of physical touch, it is better the child speak up to a responsible adult and address the painful experience, not learn to justify or accept it. Moreover, the story says that Daadi’s habit comes from her guilt over a character’s death (the connection of this to cheek-pinching is explained in the book – I won’t go into details), so she uses the habit for reassurance. But there is a second character for whose death also Daadi felt guilty and hence she decided to stop the habit. So why is she still pinching Vivek’s cheeks? A cheeky muddle, this!

😒 The story often depicts Daadi’s rudeness towards her daughter-in-law, Vivek’s mother. Her caustic remarks are made in the presence of Vivek, who gets appropriately annoyed at first but then lets it go as Daadi has “trauma” in her past. Sorry, but I don’t subscribe to this idea. Having a sad past doesn't justify being rude to loved ones in the present, all the more in the presence of children.

😒 The plot leaves a lot unsaid. There’s no explanation about how Daadi came to the US from Varanasi when she was from a poor family. Nor do we know how she became a nurse or even how she went from being a nurse to growing grapes and making raisins.

All in all, I accept that the book meant well, wanting to address the issue of inter-generational trauma for a younger audience. But the packaging and the content doesn’t really come together as a cohesive whole. Young adults might understand Vivek’s pain and Daadi’s trauma, but good luck getting them to read a picture book with such graphics. Perhaps a different art style might help the book reach the right audience, provided it plugs in the plot holes.

I received a complimentary copy of this book and these are my honest thoughts about it, written voluntarily.