First things first – the cover is beautiful. It pops out, as it should. My first glimpse of the book was at a colleague’s desk that is perennially cluttered with, well, books, and empty water bottles. Among all those heavy 1,000-page tomes of wisdom, sat this little lemon yellow book. Diminutive it may have been, but it had a loud voice thanks to the bright lemon yellow colour and the almost 3D-like cover illustration by Roger Dahl, whose work has made the book look like a delectable platter of jujubes.
I am not ashamed to admit that I prefer books with ‘photos’. Often, I have chosen one book over others because it either had photos or it had more photos or it had better photos; the story came second. (The logic being that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.) With this book, too, I hungrily flipped through the pages to ogle at the illustrations which convinced me that this was not one of the badly-spelled-quickly-put-together children’s books that are printed now. And I was right.
The story, in a few words, is about a girl who gets nudged along, sometimes unwillingly, to writing a book. The rest, I believe, you should read. What I would like to specifically point out is that Payal Kapadia’s wordplay is exciting, and thankfully, not simplistic. Many of the books that I have recently read from this category fall into the trap of being bubblegum like sweet and monotonous. Wisha Wozzariter is anything but.
The characters are clearly defined and well portrayed. The plot is complex enough to hold a young reader’s (and adults’) interest without being too difficult.
But why would you listen to me? But would you listen to Ruskin Bond when he says the book has “never a dull sentence…”? The book is not only a must-read, but also for keeps.
by Kaveri Nandan
http://www.businessworld.in/news/books/reviews/imagination-unchained/888253/page-1.html