Flying in Colors - Padma Prasad Reddeppa - ★★.½
AUTHOR: Padma Prasad Reddeppa
GENRE: Middle-Grade Fiction.
PUBLICATION DATE: May 6, 2025.
RATING: 2.5 stars.
In a Nutshell: A middle-grade fiction set in 1970s South India. First person narrative, meandering plotline, interesting child characters, lacklustre adults, emotionally intense themes. Didn’t click with me as much as I had hoped.
Plot Preview:
1974. Nine-year-old Pavithra (known to us as ‘Pavi’) lives with her extended family in Madras. Life is an adventure with companions such as cousin Ruku, younger brother Arun, and granduncle Chanki. But there’s always a shadow over Pavi. Her mother’s brother Selva died exactly five months after she was born, and some family members seem to hold Pavi’s birth as the trigger for the loss. Pavi obviously never knew Selva personally, but she feels like she has a strong tie to him. When the grownups in her life don’t offer her satisfactory answers, she uses her imagination to find the way ahead.
The story comes to us in Pavi’s first-person perspective.
I was quite excited when I saw this debut work set in 1970s Madras (now known as Chennai.) Neither the era nor the location are often explored in children’s fiction. As an OwnVoices work, it promised a great deal of authenticity. The resultant experience was decent, but I am not sure if it matches what was promised in the blurb.
Bookish Yays:
🥭 The digital copy begins with Pavi's family tree from both her maternal and parental sides. Next comes a section titled ‘Notes of Tamil culture’. Both would be helpful to little readers, Even I found the Notes informative.
🥭 Pavi’s cousin Ruku is an outstanding character. I really enjoyed the conversations between these two girls. The fact that they were not similar to each other in behaviour and yet were so strongly connected in thoughts and deeds made their bond even more special.
🥭 The portrayal of 1970s India. Though I wasn’t even alive in that decade, many incidental points in this book reminded me of similar experiences from my childhood. The sadness of summer vacations ending, the joy of the first summer mango, the excitement of getting cartoon book labels for textbooks, older relatives calling our hair a “crow’s nest” when it wasn't oiled, exchanging old clothes for new vessels with the travelling utensil salesman… Nostalgia!
🥭 Quite a few fun adventures in the storyline. The mango escapade and the coin disaster would probably be my favourites. Pavi’s imaginative wonderings add to the magic of the story.
Bookish Mixed Bags:
🌴 There’s no cohesive plot, as a result of which the book feels disjointed at times. Such jumpiness is not that uncommon in a middle-grade adventure book, but this certainly isn’t an adventure story. Furthermore, as commonly occurs with many debut novels, this story includes too many topics, enhancing the fragmented feel.
🌴 Despite the bright colours on the cover and the joyful-sounding title, this is not a happy book. It explores several dark emotions and superstitions, all of which are well-handled but might be upsetting to younger or sensitive middle-graders.
Bookish Nays:
🌶️ I don't think the blurb is indicative of the content. While it contains no major spoilers, it seems to present a different picture of the plotline, making it slightly misleading. Some of the details it contains don’t even come in the first half of the book and are just incidental to the main story.
🌶️ The chapters are on the longish side, which might not work for every young reader. But this too would have been okay had the pacing been steadier. Unfortunately, the meandering and episodic narration makes the proceedings too slow to be engrossing.
🌶️ Surprisingly for a book with Indian characters, I couldn’t relate to most of them. Some of the secondary characters echoed sentiments I have heard in my extended family, but their role is quite minor. Pavi seems age-appropriate at times, and overly young at other times. No character other than Ruku was impactful to me.
🌶️ The book has too many irresponsible adults with poor behaviour and no sense of communication. Their actions as well as their over-reliance on secrets got on my nerves.
🌶️ As we hear the story from Pavi’s direct narration, we know only what she knows. Considering the above-mentioned tendency of the adult characters to keep secrets, this limits our understanding of their behaviour.
🌶️ Some inclusions struck me as odd. The spelling of Chanakya being written as “Chanukya”, a child referring to Mahatma Gandhi as “Gandhi” and not by his honorific or the respectful ‘-ji’ at the end. Not that kiddos abroad would notice this, but authenticity is authenticity, after all.
🌶️ Personal Preference (and spoiler): I don’t like books showing a child running away from home in a bid to find solutions.
🎧 The Audiobook Experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 6 hours, is narrated by Rita Amparita. I did like her performance in general, and she even provided the right emotions for Pavi’s first-person POV. However, her mispronunciation of Indian names was very distracting to me. “Aa-ppa” for “Appa”, “too-laa-see” for tulsi, “Bo-say” for (Subhash Chandra) Bose… so many words were butchered! I didn’t even understand a couple of the words until I cracked the phonetic code bit by bit. In a book with multiple Indian names and words, these incorrect pronunciations stopped me from immersing myself wholly into the narrative. Honestly, if the narrator were of Indian origin, I would have been even more critical of her performance. But looking up her profile showed me that she is an Indonesian-American voice actor. Indonesia and India aren’t the same country and not even in the same part of the Asian continent! Why wasn’t someone of Indian origin or with greater familiarity with Indian names/words chosen for this audiobook?
Then again, most of the listeners might be based in the USA, so they probably won't find the audio version as irksome as I did. 🤷🏻♀️
Overall, this was a decent debut, but perhaps a bit too introspective and random for the intended audience. It also needs some editing to ensure a better flow to the storyline and tighter pacing.
The novelty of the setting might also work for or against the book, depending on the knowledge of the reader. I am an Indian (and way older than middle-grade age) so I am familiar with the ethos of the Indian culture as well the atmosphere of this historical time period. I am not sure how successful this book would be with middle-graders in the USA, even if they are of Indian origin. The historical storyline and unfamiliar cultural background might distance the plot from contemporary young ones.
Of course, a few children do like to read challenging books that offer a glimpse into a new culture and a young protagonist’s imaginative world. I hope this book reaches their hands.
My thanks to Hear Our Voices Book Tours, Lee & Low Books, Tu Books, and Recorded Books for a complimentary copy of 'Flying in Colors' via Edelweiss+ & NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn't work out better.
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Blurb:
Aunties tell nine-year-old Pavi that she’s asking too many “big women” questions, but she’s tired of grown-up secrets. How are babies born? And why do people die? A beautiful debut about family, tradition, and the healing that comes from finding the answers.
It’s 1975, Tamil Nadu, South India, and nine-year-old Pavi is living a carefree life with her large intergenerational family. Everyday is an adventure. Why not steal 233 mangoes from the neighbor’s tree? Or make up grand stories that take her to Jupiter? If only there wasn’t a sadness lingering over the family. You see, her uncle Selva died just five months after she was born.
Pavi may have been just a baby when Selva died, but she feels close to him, as if he’s watching over her, helping her when she needs it. But she has so many questions about Selva’s death. And why does anyone die when they do?
The grown-ups in Pavi’s life are hiding something. They dismiss her questions. For instance, when Pavi and her cousins ask about babies, all anyone says is “Little women are asking big women questions.” And when she asks about Selva, there are no answers either. Why is talking about life and death so hard? Pavi is tired of grown-up secrets!
But what if those answers can hurt, or bad things happen? Can prayers and traditions really protect those we love? Pavi is determined to find out.
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Author Padma Prasad Reddeppa:
Padma Prasad Reddeppa was born in Chennai, India, and is a poet, writer and painter. Her Indian roots provide the material for her imagination. Several of her short stories have been published in various literary magazines in the US and in India.
Padma has a postgraduate degree in English literature and was an English lecturer at Stella Maris College, Chennai, before she migrated to the US. Padma is based in Fairfax, Virginia, where she volunteers for the Fairfax Art League.
Flying in Colors is her debut novel.
Connect with her on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ppaaddmmaa/
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Check out this book:
Purchase from:
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Colors-Padma-Prasad-Reddeppa/dp/1643796755
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flying-Colors-Padma-Prasad-Reddeppa/dp/1643796755
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flying-Colors-Padma-Prasad-Reddeppa/dp/1643796755
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This has been a stop on the #FlyingInColors blog tour conducted by Hear Our Voices Tours. (@hearourvoicestours) Thanks for stopping by!
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