MellowDrama

Let's introduce you to three extraordinary authors and illustrators who have left an indelible mark on children's literature. From captivating illustrations to enchanting narratives, their works have captured the hearts of readers worldwide. Join me on this delightful journey into the world of Oliver Jeffers, Julia Donaldson, and Chris Riddell. 1. Oliver Jeffers: Where Imagination Takes Flight!   Oliver Jeffers Picture this: vibrant colors, whimsical illustrations, and stories that make your heart soar. That's Oliver Jeffers for you! With his unique visual storytelling style, he transports readers to magical worlds through books like "Lost and Found" and "The Day the Crayons Quit." Jeffers' enchanting artistry will leave you in awe and craving more. 2. Julia Donaldson: Words That Dance Off the Page! Julia Donaldson Prepare to be swept off your feet by the lyrical tales of Julia Donaldson. With her rhythmic language and unforgettable characters, she c...

Reading is a gateway to a world of knowledge, imagination, and personal growth. Whether you're nurturing a child's reading habits or looking to cultivate your own, developing a lifelong love for books is a journey worth embarking on. In this blog post, we'll explore smart and informative tips and tricks to create lasting reading habits that will enrich your life and expand your horizons. Here are some nifty ideas to get yourself or your little ones to build a reading habit: 1. Create a Reading Challenge:  Design a fun and interactive reading challenge to make reading a thrilling adventure. Set achievable goals, offer rewards or incentives, and track progress together. Whether it's completing a certain number of books or exploring different genres, a reading challenge adds excitement and motivation. 2. Make Reading Interactive:  Enhance the reading experience by incorporating interactive elements. Encourage children to create their own bookmarks, act out scenes from thei...

I had been advanced a copy of Luanne Rice's thriller Last Day by NetGalley and let me thank them, the author and the publisher at the outset. Last Day is set in Connecticut and is a story of four women who have grown up together. Though touted as a thriller, I found it hard to see it as one purely. Rather Last Day is an emotional journey about friendship and sisterhood. Beth Woodward is found dead in her bedroom. Her head has been smashed and she has been strangulated with her lace panties. The killer had put the air conditioning at the highest to ensure that the body decay is slowed down and maybe had violated Beth before extinguishing the flame of her life. Beth was six months pregnant. A painting that hung in her bedroom is gone. Beth was discovered by her sister Kate who is a pilot and who raised an alarm after she had failed to get any response from her sister, who was going through a difficult pregnancy, for three days. Beth was home alone as her husband had on...

The Swap by journalist Shuma Raha is a story that is based on the trend of swinging or what is commonly known as wife-swapping. The story is set in Delhi. Priya is a journalist who is married to Akash for six years but now the once-in-love couple have grown apart, maybe distant as well. There is a lack of intimacy and as happens  after years of togetherness, things have become boring for both of them. During a dinner party at their house, a guest called Tarun Paul tells everyone gathered there about the very happening thing in Delhi social circles- the swinging parties. Going by the keen interest that almost everyone at the dinner party had shown on the topic, Tarun extends to them all an invite for the next one which was being organised by their friends. Though reluctant, Priya gives in and goes with Akash to the party. Things which should have gotten better after the swap, become even worse and Priya finds Akash distancing himself further from her. Priya though has a extrama...

What an excellent and important this little book is! This is a book that I would gladly recommend to all the grown ups and all the children alike because everyone worries and mostly no one knows how to deal with it. The author not only addresses the many guises that often the smallest of worries dons on and comes knocking or to use a phrase from the book 'has no manners and barges in'. I loved the way the author has given everyday causes and symptoms that any child might be able to relate to, to explain what does a worry feel like, how it can manifest itself as a physical ailment or a mental block and how to conquer it. The fact that Wolff and Savitz have not only spoken about how and what causes worry-a bully, first day of school, fear of sleeping alone to name a few- but also the ways in which it can be tackled, makes the book a keeper to be reached out for when you are feeling a little lost as a parent or even as an individual. The illustrations on my Kindle probably ...

I am a thrillers fan.  Alistair MacLean This obsession sort of started in my early teens when I would devour The Hardy Boys and the Nanacy Drews in the school library and went back asking for more. My father and mother, both avid readers, had the entire Sherlock Holmes' collection at home. Someone gave me a Sidney Sheldon as a birthday present and a few years later my uncle opened the doors of his home library to me (which washout of bounds till I was a certain age) and I was almost drowning in the worlds created by James Hadley Chase, Alistair MacLean, Leon Uris and the likes. If you have been a regular reader of my blog then you would know Hercule Poirot how after my daughter was born I completely lost touch with reading till a friend gifted me a Poirot ( It was the first one that Sophie Hannah had written resurrecting the little detective with an egg shaped head).  As I got more and more involved in the business of thrillers, mysteries and crime novels, I...

I am currently reading MT Vasudevan Nair's novel Bhima Lone Warrior. How I come to buy this book is a story in itself and I will get to it later but first I want to talk about what this book made me realise. I consider myself an avid mythology fan. I have grown up listening to stories of the fantastic beasts of our Indian mythology and the whole plethora of characters that feature our 'Mythos' (Thank you Stephen Fry!) I have been reading Bhima Lone Warrior by MT Vasudevan Nair and have been thinking about the unsung people we come across. The sidekicks and the people who came second. Remember the dialogue from the movie 3 Idiots? (No, go see the movie. Your life will change) Yes? Great! . There are stories about everyone in Mahabarat. Some are fascinating, some are humorous and some are huge lessons on conduct and living. . There is Yudhishtra, the first born who hogged the limelight in the #epic #Mahabharat and made some really poor decisions and there is Arjun...

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear is a historical mystery novel set in London. But don't just head out and get it if you prefer your mysteries or crimes a bit on the stronger, harder, more depraved side. This novel is set after the World War 1 and is a peek into the realities and harshness of a war. Maisie Dobbs starts as a househelpat the Belgravia Mansion which belongs to the Comptons. But thats not where the book starts. The book opens in the year 1929, with Maisie setting up her detective agency and a man approaching her to investigate if his wife is having an affair. Soon after solving the crime, the book takes us back to the beginnings of Dobbs as a private investigator. We learn about her dexterity at the Belgravia mansion and how the lady of the house Mrs Compton and her friend Maurie Blanche, discover her to be an intelligent girl and decide to mentor her. She goes as far as getting admission in the university but the war breaks out and she enlists as a nurse. Sent to ...

Read it for a spunky, hardworking and hard hitting female protagonist and a villain who will send chills down your spine. ------------------- I have to say at the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery as I have seen being the case with everyone of them where a female cop who is good at her job. Credit must be given to the author JA Konrath for writing a plot that has the twists and turns of a good, gripping thriller and still has the scope for character development, more like fleshing out the character, in this book. So our heroine is named Jack Daniels, short for Jacquline Daniels is an insomniac, her boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer and in generals having a difficult time coping with life when a serial killer who calls himself the Gingerbread Man starts to leave mutilated bodies of women in dumpsters in her district. A binge eating partner, an old gangster she had busted years ago and a couple of (moronic looking and sounding) guys from the FBI form...

Read this medical thriller for a superbly knit plot, leave it aside if you can't deal with gory descriptions. ------------------------------------ I have not been so scared after reading a thriller as I have been after reading The Surgeon byTess Gerristen. It had a very deep impact on me and It is I guess a good one month after I read it that I could bring myself to write a not so long review of this medical mystery where Detective inspector Jane Rizzoli makes her first appearance. The Surgeon begins with the story of a successful doctor Catherine Cordell handling an emergency wherein an old man who has met with an accident is brought in a critical condition. Next we are told that she had escaped a murder attempt by a former student in a different city two years back and had shot her assailant dead. A new set of murders comes to light and Detective Thomas Moore realises that the MO of these murders have something in common with the attack on Cordell. The police is befud...

If you have been following me for sometime, you might know that I am on a personal mission to read as many first thrillers where a Detective or a Detective Inspector makes an appearance, from world over. So far, I have read some awesome Detectives etched by writers from the Nordic countries ( Jo Nesbo , Helen Tursten , Kristina Ohlsson ),  the US ( JK Rowling aka Robert Galbraith ) and this one that I am going to review next, from England ( MJ Arlidge , this though is his fifth on the link). I have also read some remarkable stand alone thrillers like No time for Goodbye and the Japanese masterpiece Devotion Suspect X (which I think kicked my obsession with finding the first ones of the series and which was so mind-blowing that its review isn't even comprehensible slink to another one of his works that is also so so good. Must rectify that one someday though when I can get over the awesomeness). You might wonder why am I doing it. Even I think what is this going to achiev...

You know how it is when you open social media and sort of in a moment when you are to being mindful begin to feel sorry for yourself. You get into a rut and keep lamenting about things that could have been. You keep thinking about how good things only seem to be happening to people who take snapshots and frame them for Facebook posts and Instagram feed. Maybe they do it for the Twitter and Tumblr and Snapchat and whatever else there is, what would I know, as I can barely handle those two. So to cut a long story short, lying in the bed till a few minutes ago I was lamenting the lack of holidays and holiday pictures as well parties and party pictures and cursing my luck how I never seem be able to do anything 'fun' and being stuck in this unenviable spot like forever since 1990s. then I began to think of the most momentous thing that has happened to mean the last 1 year and it was like opening the floodgates of memory. I began to realise how giving this whole year had been and...

If you are a parent there are more chances than one that YOU have handed your child a book to read. Or you have chosen to bring home the books that you think that she might like to read. If any of these hold true then we are almost alike and no this is not an article that tells you how wrong you have been all along in bringing your child the books that you choose. This is just a few of my thoughts on this very subject that I gathered today morning as I wrote an Instagram post. Let me begin at the beginning. Today my soon to be 4, son sat down with a book and was at it for good 10-15 minutes. No, it wsn't a tome. It wa a small picture book on trucks. My friend gifted him this book on trucks on his first birthday. The chap was fascinated with it from the moment he got it. You could flip pages and see bright pictures of different types of trucks and then you could open little sliding screens to find out men in uniform who drove a certain kind of truck. Unsurprisingly his first...

The year has started on the right note. I have already read two authors whom I had not read before falling hard for the one being hailed as Japanese Steig Larrson- Keigo Hagashino. That is what got me thinking about new year resolutions  (I know we are done with the first quarter) which I haven't made in years. So here is a list of authors that I would like to sample this year. - 1. Manu Joseph 2. Pico Iyer 3. Anthony Horowitz 4. Margret Atwood 5. Toni Morrison 6. Chimamanda Adichie 7. Jo Nesbo 8. Neil Gaiman 9. Terry Pratchett 10. Alice Munro/  Walker But I also realise the futility of making a list like this as there are just so many authors, poets, writers and just so many works coming to fore everyday. A book group might help, you would think but let me tell you that it complicates things further. New recommendations, fantastic and not so fantastic reviews, pictures, blog posts and what not really makes matter well,complicated. All said and done, ...

A novel set during the Mughal period bringing to life characters from your History books, and possessing all the qualities of a good romance novel (and alas just that!). ******************************************* It is not the first time that I keep colliding with a book everywhere I turn. 'The Twentieth Wife' by Indu Sundarsena and I bumped at Kindle lists, on the book blogs, some IG handles of book lovers I follow as well as on the comments and posts of the reading  group on FB. Thus, taking the hint from Providence I downloaded it on my Kindle along with  a handful of others, a few days back. I started to read it some 3 days back and finished this novel set in 17th century India yesterday evening. The book tells the story of the woman- Mehrunnissa, whom we all have known fleetingly and as Nur Jahan, wife of Mughal emperor Jahangir. Born in to the family of a Persian refugee, Ghias Beg, Mehrunnissa is left out on the road by the desperate father ...

As glamourous as the cover looks, the book is but a predictable story of a holier-than-thou heroine who falls on bad times and as is expected rises above her circumstances. ********************************************* The cover of The Duchess by Danielle Steel had me at the very first glance and I was looking so forward to reading it. I am not much a 'Romance' person but off and on I do go back to the genre to feel good about life and exhale all my pent up energies as I sigh reading the exploits of people who are affected by love (read are in love). Just before I started this book, I had read the very fabulous and my first Colleen Hoover- It Ends With Us (Now reading November 9). I read it from cover to cover and had I been reading a hard copy I would have taken the book with me everywhere I went like a beloved person. So it was with high hopes that I started this Steele. The Duchess is set in 19th century England where the women had no claim on any property, be it...

This is the first book in the Vish Puri series and I unfortunately read it after I had read The Case of the Love Commandos. Had I read it before I would have been even more favourably inclined towards the author. To cut a long story short, this is a much more lovable book then the previous one and something gives me a feeling that all the other ones after this, as wel.. So without much ado, here is what I thought of the plot, characters and the writing in the book, "The Case of the Missing Servant". A servant goes amiss and the employer- an upright lawyer in Rajasthan- is charged with her murder. When our hero, 'the' Vish Puri of Most Private Investigators starts on the job, he has nothing to go on with. The lawyer's wife and others in the household can't help him beyond the missing servant's name. They did not know where she came from and of course where had she mysteriously disappeared to. The only thing he finds in the servant quarter that she occu...

Umm.....The book makes for a light reading. If you are an Indian reading this book, chances are you will be supremely impressed by Mr. Hall's knowledge (or research) on Indian towns and how things work here. I may add here that he is a British journalist living now in India with his wife. That said, I found the book enjoyable to a great extent but also found some bits and parts quite irritating.  The most enjoyable things first. The caste of characters and their names. Consider these- Facecream, Flush and Tubelight. The plot is thick and quite absorbing. You do want to find out what is going on with the characters and do want to get to the bottom of things. The plot takes you from Khan Market in New Delhi to a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi to the villages of UP. The author is very particular about the details of the gulleys and the lanes that he mentions in the story and I felt as if he might have visited each one of them standing there thinking about how to further the pl...

To begin to like your own cooking is also a way of evolving. You are your own best judge and you are very well conversant with your graph. The ups and the downs. The highs and the burnt lows. Acceptance from family members is definitely a bonus but not an assured one. So I cook for myself now and the others in the house have to go along with it. I am liking what I am making more and more (like yesterday night's paneer paranthas) and that is quite a happy place to be in. ******* I went to the loo. Before I sat down on the pot Abir followed me in with 2 Peppa Pig books and sat down on the floor. Rather settled down comfortably in his striped pajamas. Then he gave me one book and asked me to read it to him. He never tires of these. So again we did Peppa's family loves different things. And we did them again in the morning when he was following me incessantly with those two again while I had to do Netra's tiffin and lunch and breakfast related cooking. 

What do you remember when you recall your childhood? I am assaulted by doubts when I think what my daughter will remember of me during her childhood.Will it all be evil? Full of shouting? Angry outbursts? Hurtful words? Then I decided to see what I recalled from my childhood. There are sights and there are sounds that came flooding. Often there have been episodes and incidents which crop up from nowhere, at times surprising me with the intensity and clarity with which they come on a perfectly normal day. But when I made a conscious effort of remembering the days bygone I was surprised with the warmth and fuzzy feelings that I encountered. Here is a peek. I recall changotra sessions at my naani's house. This is quite vivid. I can smell the winter sun of Palampur even now at its mere mention. The fragrance of this huge citrus fruit as it was brought out before the lunch hour from a tree in front of my naani's house.The peeling, the preparation of a special herbed salt and ...