Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Jason Reynolds ILLUSTRATOR: Alexander Nabaum GENRE: Middle-grade story collection. RATING: 4.5 stars. A wonderful collection of ten stories all set around a common theme of children walking home from school. The characters overlap in a few of the stories but the main character(s) are distinct for each tale. This isn’t a typical children’s anthology and these are the reasons why: 👉 So many authors steer clear of "taboo" topics -- parental illness, deaths, abuse, bullying, homosexuality -- and make children's fiction goody-goody happy experiences. Not Jason Reynolds. 👉 So many authors will try to incorporate higher level vocabulary in their works so that the book ends up as an "educational" experience for its young readers. Not Jason Reynolds. A tardigrade isn't called a tardigrade, it's a water bear. That's indicative of an author who knows what his readers enjoy. 👉 Show me one author who can write a story around boogers and still make it ...

Author: Jane Davis Genre: Contemporary Literary Fiction. Rating: 4.5 stars. This was a tough one to review. I’m still at a loss about where to begin. My usual “Nutshell” summation escapes me. So I’ll just start by saying: I LOVED this book, but it is not for everyone. Read on to see if this book will work for you. Story: The story comes to us from multiple perspectives and over multiple timelines. Ayisha, July 2010 onwards – A high school teacher, the story begins with her discovering that one of her colleagues, Jim Stevens, has been stabbed in broad daylight in the school grounds. There’s a big group of stunned students surrounding him, but no one wants to confess what happened. Ayisha chooses Shamayal, one of the students, to assist her in providing first aid to Jim until medical assistance arrives. But when she later discovers that Shamayal and Jim are friends, she wonders if she should report her colleague to the educational authorities. Why does she hesitate? What makes her, a str...

AUTHOR: Stephen G. Bowling GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: November 30, 2020 RATING: 4.25 stars This is a sweet little story about a little robin named “Simon”. He wants to invite all his farm animal friends to his home. But as can be expected, they are too big to fit in his little house. Simon is depressed until his mother figures a way around the problem. The story is simple and straightforward, and yet it drives home many important points, two of which are: 👉 Where there is a will there is a way; and 👉 Home is where your heart is. It was also nice to see Simon have a variety of animal friends, rather than being restricted only to birds. It drives home a subtle point of being open to diversity. The book is written in simple rhythmic verse that flow in pleasant harmony. So this will be a wonderful read-aloud companion for early readers as the rhymes don’t sound jarring. The illustrations are really cute and vibrant, though in some cases, actual animal proportion...

AUTHOR: Stephen G. Bowling GENRE: Children's Picture Book. PUBLICATION DATE: July 25, 2021 RATING: 4.5 stars Simon the robin returns with yet another quest. This time, he is off to seek a scary dragon whom he has heard of. But none of his friends seem to be aware of this dragon until Simon finally meets the Wise Owl who points him in the right direction. This story is even cuter than the first book. Once again, it was nice to see a variety of animals in the narration. Simon’s exuberance is contagious and you will be as curious as he is to know the whereabouts of the dragon. Of course, I was a bit surprised to see him, a robin, approaching an eagle and an owl to seek answers. Wouldn’t he be instinctively scared of birds of prey? I was also confused about how Simon heard the stories of the scary dragon while none of his friends had even heard of a dragon being around. But that’s just me, over-applying logic as always. From a child’s perspective, the book should work just fine. I love...

AUTHOR: Moritz Petz ILLUSTRATOR: Amelie Jackowski GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: July 22, 2004 RATING: 4.5 stars. What a wonderful book this is! A simple story with a fabulous message. Badger has woken up in a really bad mood. ( I so empathise with him. Mornings can be tough! ) As he goes along his day, he rebuffs all friends who attempt to chat with him. While his mood improves as the day progresses, he realises that his friends are now in a grumpy mood, all thanks to him. The story is written in simple prose and fairly easy vocabulary. Early readers should be able to handle the book independently as well. There are many expressive dialogues so this will be a treat for read-alouds. I loved the illustrations too. They are so vibrant! The animals are drawn in such an expressive manner that you can gauge their mood just by looking at them. The only minor complaint I have is that the dissolution of Badger’s bad mood happens within the span of a sentence. It seemed to...

AUTHOR: Glenn Ringtved ILLUSTRATOR: Charlotte Pardi TRANSLATOR: Robert Moulthrop GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: February 16, 2016 RATING: 5 stars! What a wonderful book this is! Never thought a book on such a dreary topic could be handled so beautifully. Death has come to take away the grandmother of four little children. So they decide to try diverting his attention away from his task. He then tells them a beautiful story that helps them understand how life is incomplete without death. This would be a fabulous book to help little children understand something as tragic as death. As the Grim reaper himself puts it, "Cry, Heart, But Never Break." Don't allow the grief to overwhelm you but remember that life moves on, and focus on the good memories of those who are no longer with you. The message that the book conveys is important for adults too. So this can be a beautiful book to read together if you want to explain the why's of death to your chi...

AUTHOR: Kimberly Garvin ILLUSTRATOR: Saadiq Wicks GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: July 26, 2017 RATING: 3.5 stars This is a book that has its heart in the right place. Oliver is a seven year old who is great in many activities but hates to speak. The reason? He has a stutter. After escaping his school speaking assignment on “All About Me” for a long time, he approaches his mother for help. She makes him realise that his stutter is a part of who he is and he needs to accept it willingly. This marks a turnaround in his thinking. The moral of the story is fabulous. You actually feel for Oliver when he stutters, “I don’t want them to know all about me.” So many children lose their confidence because of their so-called shortcomings. But if they accept it, laugh at it, and don’t shy away from it, life can certainly be a bit easier for them. That’s where this book does really well. The message comes out very clearly. I do wish the end weren’t so abrupt. It would have been...

AUTHOR: Megha Majumdar GENRE: Indian Contemporary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: June 2, 2020 RATING: 4.5 stars. Have you ever read a book where you don’t want to shut the book even after you complete reading it? Where you just stare into vacant space, shocked and speechless? Where the characters stay in your head even when you want them to leave you? Where you don’t want to believe that such type of people actually exist in real life but deep down, you know that they do? When I picked up this book, it was just another Indian author book but to be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, it came with a boatload of expectations attached: much-acclaimed, well-reviewed, a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2021, a Goodreads Choice Award finalist for Fiction and for Debut Novel in 2020, and despite all this, a GR rating of just 3.75 ( my usual cut-off for GR ratings is 3.8 ) I was prepared to be disappointed and just wanted to get this book out of my TBR. Boy, was...

AUTHOR: Christina Furnival ILLUSTRATOR: Katie Dwyer GENRE: Children's Nonfiction. PUBLICATION DATE: September 14, 2021 RATING: 4.5 stars As parents, we tell our children to be kind and friendly with everyone. But in the course of giving this advice, we tend to forget that there are bullies too in this world. All of us know at least one bully who doesn’t listen to reason but insists on getting things their way. For children (and adults), a bully is difficult to deal with. That’s where this book steps in. The biblical adage of “Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you” is something I firmly believe in. The child in this story also follows the same approach. She is sweet and friendly with everyone. But despite her best efforts, one of the children always fights with her. After trying harder and speaking with her parents, she realises that she needs to set some boundaries not just for herself but in how she allows others to treat her. The idea of the book is great, the ex...

AUTHOR: Melissa Dalton Martinez ILLUSTRATOR: Tom Tolman GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: August 31, 2021 RATING: 3.5 stars. Tough to believe that the very first Doctor Dolittle story was published more than a hundred years ago in 1920. This picture book contains a much simplified version of the classic story but with an interesting little twist midway. I was a bit disappointed because the story here doesn’t flow very smoothly. If you have ever heard a child narrating some incident, the flow is usually “I went here. I saw this. And then I went there. I did that. And then I met him…“ You don’t get descriptions or feelings. You get crisp sentences full of actions and you wonder where the story is going. And that’s exactly what this story gives you; one action sentence after another. There is not much smoothness between the scene changes and this leads to some gaps in the plot. But I need to consider it from the target reader’s perspective and that age group is the 2-5 ...

AUTHOR: Krystaelynne Sanders Diggs ILLUSTRATOR: Ananta Mohanta GENRE: Children's Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: July 10, 2021 RATING: Undecided! It goes without saying that such topics must be accompanied by a conversation by a parent/guardian. A parent can’t simply rely on the book to do the parenting. I was hoping that this book would serve as a good option for a parent to introduce the topic of safe touch. But it turned out to be a case of “good intention, bad implementation.” The story is written in rhythmic verse and talks of a little girl who has been taught by her mom where hands should go through a poem. I wasn’t a great fan of the rhymes as they seemed forced and included a couple of words too difficult for children to understand. (‘stray’ and ‘unruly’) But more than this, I wasn’t a fan of the information provided. Basically, this poem only states that kids should shout ‘NO’ and run away when ‘hands begin to stray’. But what does ‘straying’ actually mean to a child? What pa...

AUTHOR: Alicia Fadgen ILLUSTRATOR: Victoria Robustello GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: August 3, 2021 RATING: 2.5 stars. If you are a clumsy person, you surely understand the struggles of knocking things over or banging into walls while walking. Callie is one such child. Her clumsiness is so extreme that her classmates tease her and even spout a funny chant about her clumsiness which they repeat whenever she is around. When she received an invite for a friend’s birthday party, she is both surprised and worried. But to her surprise, her clumsiness somehow ends up saving the day. The idea behind the story is very cute. The way the children learn not to make fun of someone for their traits and to accept everyone as they are, the way Callie learns that she is much more than her clumsiness, these are put across very well in the book. Unfortunately though, the presentation is quite amateurish at times. This is supposed to be a book in rhythmic verse but the rhyme scheme...

AUTHOR: James McKimmey GENRE: Sci-Fi Short Story RATING: 4.25 stars. Want a sci-fi short story that makes you introspect? Try this one! Story Summary: Sixteen year old George is in love with Gistla. The problem is that Gistla is not a fellow human but a Venusian he met when humans colonised the planet. His family seems to be the elite among the settlers and can’t understand their son’s love for a weird-looking alien. Is there any future to this young love story? George initially comes across as a level-headed boy and mature beyond his years. Sample these thoughts from his heartbroken mind: “But she was a person. The beauty was inside of her. Did you have to point to a girl's face and say, "Here is where the nose should be, here is where the ears should be?" Did you have to measure the width between eyes and test the color of the skin? Did you have to check the size of the teeth and the existence of hair? Was all of this necessary to understand what was inside someone?” B...

AUTHOR: Baptiste Bouthier ILLUSTRATOR: Héloïse Chochois GENRE: Graphic Memoir PUBLICATION DATE: August 20, 2021 RATING: 3.5 stars I was in two minds about whether to go for this book or not. I have read two fabulous books on this topic just last year and I am old enough to know what exactly happened on 9/11. But having the story told in graphic format was a new appeal and so I decided to give this a try. The result? Mixed feelings. Every adult already knows the details of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Whether you are a US citizen or not, there is no way you could have forgotten the image of the plane smashing into the two towers of the WTC. No matter what nationality you belong to, your life has changed since 9/11/2001, even if you weren’t alive that day. And this graphic novel shows you exactly how! This book presents the events that day in two perspectives: the actual unfolding of the attacks in New York, and the reactions of the French citizens who were watching it on their TV sets. T...

AUTHOR: Lyanda Lynn Haupt GENRE: Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: April 4, 2017 RATING: 4.25 stars. Most books about pets seem to dwell on more common choices: dogs and cats being the most popular. This little gem came as a surprise to me. What could be more unique than a pet starling, right? The author is a nature writer, a birdwatcher, and a committed wildlife advocate. While watching some starlings play outside her window, a story she had heard popped into her head: that of Mozart having a starling as a pet. And this random memory triggered a whole lot of action, culminating with this book. You might be aware of starlings mainly for their magical murmurations. The sight of hundreds of thousands of them moving as one is bewitching to watch. But that's only one side of the story. You need to know the other side too, especially if you aren't much aware of birds in Western countries. Starlings are considered pests. If you Google for America's most hated bird, starlings come out ...

AUTHOR: James Clear GENRE: Self-Help, Motivational Nonfiction. PUBLICATION DATE: October 18, 2018 RATING: 3.5 stars. This came highly recommended and that's why I broke my resolution of no self-help books. Now that I’m done with it, I can see why it is so beloved and often suggested as a life-changer. This is one of the better self-help books I’ve read because it’s quite practical. I can’t stand books that spout impractical philosophy without offering concrete and realistic methods of implementation. Most of the tips here are sensible and easily manageable. The anecdotes accompanying every advice help reinforce the point. Clear’s four-way method on how to make/break habits sounds very doable. The neat chapter summaries help in a quick checklist of the executables if you ever need a quick recap. So it is going to change my habits from now on? Nope! And that’s partly because whatever he suggested is already something I do without even realising it. I’m a compulsive planner by nature ...

AUTHOR: Bella Osborne GENRE: Contemporary Drama. RATING: 3.75 stars. We all judge a book by its cover. (Don’t deny it!) We also judge books by their titles at times. So if you see this book, you will certainly go for it because it is about the magical place we all love: the library. But does the content do justice to this title and cover? Not exactly. Story: Tom Harris. Sixteen. Dead mom. Drunk dad. Bullied at school. Lonely. Discovers that he enjoys reading romance novels, much to his embarrassment. Maggie Mann. Seventy-two. Widowed. Lives on a farm with her animals and her garden. Lonely. Discovers that her weekly book club at the library is a wonderful opportunity to find interaction with other bookworms. The common factor? Loneliness. These dear characters develop a beautiful friendship with each other courtesy their beloved local library. And when they find that the future of the library is at stake, they decide to go all out to save it. There are many things I loved about the boo...

AUTHOR: Angela Elwell Hunt ILLUSTRATOR: Marrieta Gal GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: August 2, 2018 RATING: 4.5 stars. What a cute book! And a useful one too! Henry is a little fellow who enjoys reading books to his chickens. And one of the chickens, named Red, loves the adventures that Henry recounts. But one fine day, when Henry comes into the coop with a video game, the chickens devise a plan to get their reading time back. I loved how the book puts across its message in an easy way. Especially in today’s day and age where most children prefer screens to pages, this book can come as a timely reminder of how much fun reading can be. I just wish the ending were a bit smoother. It ends too abruptly. The illustrations are reminiscent of old-time children’s books. Simple, straightforward and appealing sketches. If you are looking for an easy, independent read for your youngster, this will be a great option. But more than that, this book would serve wonderfully as a b...

Author: Sarah Adlakha Genre: Time Travel, Suspense. Rating: 3.75 stars. If you got a chance to go back and redo some decisions in your life, would you change a thing? You might say no because whatever you went through made you who you are today. But you might even say yes because you want to erase some painful memories or regretful actions from your past. Whatever your answer, you know that this is not an easy decision to make as it has a lot of repercussions. But what if you are not given a choice? That’s the situation faced by the protagonist in this story. Story: 39 year old psychiatrist Maria is living a busy life managing her home, career and two young children with a third on the way. One day, she has a strange encounter with a new patient named Sylvie, who possesses a lot of knowledge on Maria’s life and warns her to stay away from her assistant Rachel. Soon after, because of certain events I don’t want to reveal here, Maria finds herself back in time in her 17 year old self. Ho...

AUTHOR: Nicholas Tana GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: August 10, 2021 RATING: 4.5 stars. Do you choose a book by its cover? I do, many times. And this is one such occasion. What a treat to the eyes this cover is! Those huge brown eyes peeking from behind the leaves, the vivid contrasting amalgamation of reds and yellows and teal… Does the content of the book match up to the cover? It sure does! Leo, the lion cub, lives in a happy family with his parents and two elder siblings. Everything is fine except for one thing: Leo doesn’t roar. His dad wants his son to roar. His mom knows that when the time comes, he will. Though Leo ends up saving their lives twice, his dad is still worried that he can’t or won’t roar. But when there is an emergency, it is Leo who saves the day with his mighty roar. Does the book end on this happy note that Leo finally learnt to roar? Nope! The true end is the last line of the book; the line that shows that Leo hasn’t changed his basic pers...