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On My Honor
Written by Marion Dane Bauer
Published by Yearling books, an imprint of Random House Children’s books.
Reviewed by sandhya.
Peer pressure. Everyone faces it, children more so. It looms large in their small world, often leading to literally life-and-death situations.
Twelve year old Joel and Tony are ‘best friends’, very different in temperament, often squabbling and bickering, but inseparable.
Tony- exuberant, fun-loving, risk-taking, with a devil-may-care attitude. Joel, the more cautious of the two, introspecting, sensitive to undercurrents in a situation, a foil…



Pic courtesy teachwithmovies.org

The first I heard of Sidney Poitier was quite by accident, and without a realisation about the phenomenon that he is. Way back in 1997, I picked up an interesting sounding movie at my library. It was about a young couple in love, and the girl gets the boy home to meet her parents. The boy is an extraordinarily well-educated person, with a responsible job in the UN, and by all accounts, a dream suitor for anyone’s daughter. Reminded me of the Elizabeth Taylor classic- Father of…

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GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

Which self-respecting bibliophile hasn’t heard of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind? The famed love story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Even the making of its movie version is the stuff of legends.

For those who don’t, a quick re-cap : Placed during the period of the American civil war, it is a saga of the end of a way of life that was the southern states of the US, and a beginning of a more modern era after…

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DARBY
Written by Jonathon Scott Fuqua
Published by Candlewick Press
Ages 9-12 yrs

Reviewed by sandhya.

Darby Carmichael is a white, 9 yr old girl living in Bennettsville, Marlboro county, South Carolina, in the racially intolerant early 1920s. She has two “best friends”, Beth at the all-white school, and Evette Robinson, the girl who stays on the farm next door, the daughter of a black sharecropper. Darby looks forward to coming home from school everyday, so that she can just run off to play with Evette. Given a…

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Incredible High Written by Atul KapoorPublished by Cedar Books, an imprint of Pustak Mahal.
Nikhil Khanna is the ”shorter-than-average” son of a kabaadi, who feels he has been marginalised all his life for factors beyond his control. That is when he decides to take control of his life, and plans a biking trip from Manali to Leh and back, motivating his group of equally dysfunctional friends and his girlfriend to join him in his endeavour. Initially hesitant, unconvinced as to the viability of the daredevil scheme, they fall…

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ANNE FRANK
The Diary of a Young Girl
Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler
Translated by Susan Massotty
Published by Penguin Books India.
Ages 12+
Anne Frank was an ordinary thirteen year old, who kept this diary from her thirteenth birthday for the next two years. She penned all everyday happenings, her feelings about everything and everyone around her. We have her account of her growing-up pains and joys, a lowdown on her relationships, all the yo-yo-ing typical of adolescence, her darkest, deepest secrets…

Have you ever felt that feeling of having done something before (deja vu), or dreams of an experience that cannot be explained away as an experience? Likes and dislikes, fears or affinities, that are inexplicable? Do you sometimes ‘like’ someone, or feel that you know someone very well, when infact you may be meeting them for the first time? Or ‘dislike’ someone, sometimes to the point where you cannot tolerate anything about them, even if they might not have done you any real harm?
Phenomena that science has attempted to…

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A SUMMER TO DIEwritten by Lois LowryPublished by Delacorte press, an imprint of Random House.Age: young-adultReviewed by Sandhya.
Two sisters : Molly and Meg. Very different persons. Both in their teens.
Molly is the older, tidier, prettier, golden-haired, outgoing, happier, more popular, cheerleader type. More like her mother in temperament. The one who wants to grow up to get married and have her own babies…babies to love and take care of.
Meg is the younger, messier, plainer, dark-haired, reserved, upended, difficult, not-easily-popular type. More like her father in…

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Written by: Refer to cover page picture for the whole list.
Published by Scholastic Children’s books.
Ages: YA
Reviewed by sandhya.
The book is a collage of sorts, with each author writing one chapter. Each chapter can be read separately on its own, or strung together to make the whole story.

Image Courtesy Amazon

 
Have you ever seen a picture, a photograph and wondered about it? If there were some story behind the person in it, the place it had been taken at, the situation it had been…

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Image Courtesy Penguinbooksindia.

A FLIGHT OF PIGEONS
Written by Ruskin Bond
Cover photograph by Anna de’Capitani
Published by Penguin Books India.
Ages: 16+
Reviewed by sandhya.

In any instance of violence, war, etc, there are the active participants- those that actually go out to war, actually take part in the violence as the perpetrators or as the victims, who die in battle. And then there are those behind the scenes, who are equal stakeholders in the fallout of the war, those who do not actually take up arms, but…