All Four Stars – A Book Review

All Four Stars by Tara Dairman

Here’s a scrumptiously wonderful book every tween is going to love. All Four Stars is the story of Gladys Gatsby, an eleven-year-old who is passionate about cooking. Her parents, on the other hand, are not. They are both working and don’t have the time or inclination to cook. The family lives on terrible takeaways.

However, Gladys cooks up complicated delicacies in secret, when her parents are away at work. All is well until one day when her parents walk in just as she accidentally sets fire to the kitchen curtains while making Creme Brûlée. As a result of that singularly bad piece of luck, she’s banned from further cooking experiments and her allowance is taken away.

Then, through a quirk of fate, she lands an assignment as a food critic in a frontline newspaper. The catch is – getting to that restaurant which is a train-ride away from the suburb where Gladys lives. Confiding in her parents and asking for help is out of the question. So how does she do it?

This is a story delicious enough to sate the most demanding of gourmands.

It’s a perfect read-aloud book
Each night after dinner, we’d sit with this one, the children and I, reading it aloud. The descriptions of food made H hungry while N started dreaming of a career as a food critic.

What I liked
The descriptions of food were absolutely delectable. The good ones (that she had at Parm’s house or out at restaurants) were mouth-watering but it’s the bad ones that H and N enjoyed most because they were hilariously funny.

I loved that Gladys sampled and enjoyed all kinds of food – African, Malaysian and Indian too. She has an Indian friend and the rather foreign descriptions of familiar Indian foods like chhole and raita and palak paneer had the children completely thrilled.

If you’ve read any of my earlier reviews you’ll know I love a book with great side-characters. All Four Stars had many of them – Sandy, Gladys’ friend and neighbour, Parm, her Indian friend, Charissa the most popular girl at school, the kind Mr Eng who runs a cosy grocery and patisserie and Mrs Anderson, Sandy’s adorable mom. Although some of them are rather stereotypical they all manage to do something to redeem themselves, to break the stereotype. That, I was grateful for.

There are bits on friendship – on making and keeping friends – on shared secrets and making plans which the children completely loved.

If I have one complaint it would be that the author didn’t do justice to the parents. They come across as uni-dimensional, too taken up with their work, barely bothered about their daughter and rather unkind. They did get better towards the end of the book, though, so that was something.

We talked about
Whether the punishment Gladys got was fair/unfair.
Could Gladys have done things differently? Perhaps, taken the help of other sympathetic adults.

What we did
– We read up all kinds of cuisines that Gladys talks of.
– We pored (and salivated) endlessly over food pictures.
– We made up a game of trying to describe a food to someone who had never known Indian cuisine.
– And we tried baking.

This book came to us through Enchantico – a delightful book-activity box we subscribed to. Read my review of the box here. It came with a cookie recipe, premixed flour as well as cookie cutters.

With all that help we had to try our hand at baking. The first batch came out near perfect. But then we got caught up in something and ended up burning down the next one and had to rush around dousing the flames in the oven.

So you see, there really is never any guarantee with cookies but the book – that’s a sure shot winner.

 

Linking up with the Write Tribe Problogger October 2017 Blogging Challenge #writebravely #writetribeproblogger

Celebrating Differences – A Book Review

We’ve done stories from this book at the book club. I’ve shared it at almost every children’s reading forum and with every mum I know. I wonder how I left out talking about it here.
Celebrating Differences – Stories for the Children of India, is a book every child should read, every Indian child, most definitely. That’s because the setting of the stories is Indian the ideas, however, are universal.
Seven authors come together with seven stories about people with disabilities and their interactions with others. It talks about perceptions and prejudices. Sometimes we (specially children) are impatient with or unkind to people because we don’t think about the difficulties they might be dealing with or have pre-conceived notions about how they will behave.
This delightful melange of stories is an attempt to set that right.
All it takes is the story of Ritika a hearing impaired girl who learns to stop feeling sorry for herself.
The Perfumed Prowler is about Amtan a speech impaired boy who earns the respect of an aunt who had always pitied him.
Who is Faster talks about Rudra who learns that a boy in a wheelchair could be just as smart and as much fun as his other friends.
The New Neighbour is about an old school teacher who helps a little boy being bullied by his older brothers.
I Don’t Understand It is perhaps the most touching story of all. It is told from the point of view of a mentally challenged child and his perception of good and bad.
Leaf Feel is another fun story where a visually challenged girl teaches some kids a new fun game.
And finally Wheels from Kerala talks about a young girl Priya and how she learns to empathise and bond with her arthritic grandfather.
Each of these stories embodies a world of wisdom and helps to sensitise children, making them empathetic to people with differences. The print is comfortably large and the stories are suited for kids between 7-8 years of age. Though they can be read out to younger kids.
The book comes with interesting nuggets of information and also some fun colouring pages.
Priced at Rs 125 and Published by Ekansh Trust Pune, this book is absolutely invaluable.
Here are the details in case you want to get a copy: email info@ekansh.org
Phone: +919503715015
We had some of the most amazing sessions at our book club when we took up a story from this book. The children learnt a little bit of sign language – they learnt to spell their names as also simple phrases like I am sorry, Thank you and of course I Love You, which they continue to use even today. This is such a good exercise for all children.
Like in the story Leaf’s Feel they tried to recognise trees, leaves and flowers with a blindfold on their eyes simply by feeling them. That was great fun because they got to run around and touch and feel.
And lastly for the story Wheels from Kerala we got them talking to their grandparents and got back with fun tales of their parents’ childhood.

Happy birthday to The Book Club

It’s
been some time since I posted news from The Book Club. This week it needs to be written about since we turned ONE! Isn’t that wonderful? I had forgotten about it till facebook memories sent me a reminder. I do love the idea of revisiting memories.

This last weekend the meeting was pretty special what with birthday celebrations as well as Friendship Day on Sunday.

After much sifting through stories on friendship from Harry Potter to Kabuliwala to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn I settled on a relatively obscure one about a young Irani girl who finds friendship in London even while retaining her uniqueness. With pre-teens staring us in the face that’s an important aspect of friendship – this idea of loving and retaining your difference even while being best friends. 

The Friendship drawing

The funnest part was the ‘friendship drawing activity’. (I modified the idea from a book of the ‘My Weird School’ series. Review coming up soon on my other blog, do watch out). Each of the kids were asked to think up something they’d like to draw – it could be anything. They came up with a flower, a bird, a train, a boat, a scene from the Irani girls life, a robot, a scenery etc. 

I then paired them up making sure the bete noires were put together. You should have heard the protests!! ‘Aunty I can go with ANYONE but her!’ (Oh they can be rude and blunt) ‘Aunty may we PLEASE exchange our partners’. But I stuck to the plan telling them none of them was so intolerable/intolerant that they couldn’t be with each other for 15-20 minutes. And then I asked them to  put together their two ideas and make up one drawing. It was amazing how quickly they settled down and got to work with absolute concentration. Even H and N who are always at loggerheads and who I’d paired together worked like a team.

We ended up with a bird-shaped boat, a robotic flower, a girl playing with a toy train while hiding under the bed during a bombing (That was from the story of the day) and bombs destroying a pretty scenery.
These kids are seriously brilliant.

If you work with kids anywhere this is an exercise I completely recommend. Not just does it teach children to work with people they don’t much like, it also prompts them to align their thoughts and ideas with completely divergent ones and work towards a common goal,towards a common win. Those are skills they’ll need to hone in life. 

I was pretty pleased with myself. The problem is I made it out to be a contest and now I have to pick the best drawing and I’m stumped.

No more happily ever afters

I have a question today. But before that listen to this story that I shared with the children of The Book Club this Sunday. I’ll keep it short I promise.

The story (The Book Keeper)

… is set in the year 2042. It talks of a scenario where books and writing are extinct. ibooks, laptops, computers, tablets and phones are everywhere. However, there is this one poor Bangladeshi boy, Santanu, who possesses a book (A Bengali adaptation of Matilda). He doesn’t understand the Bengali script so he uses it as a diary, address book, notepad and a scribble pad all in one.

One day the Internet crashes. The parents are angry and the children, restless. They are forced to play outdoors and stumble upon a dilapidated building which happens to be a deserted library. They start to love the place. They read, run around and learn to make up stories. Then one day the Internet comes back and the kids all disappear again back to their electronic world leaving Santanu alone but happy with the books. You can read the full story here. (While you’re there you might like to check out the site. It has some amazing stories from around the world).

The question

So tell me now, does the ending bother you? It did bother me. Would you have thought of altering it before you shared the story with the kids?

I was sorely tempted to do that. I’ve tampered with stories earlier, mostly the so called ‘fairytales’, when the kids were younger. I did away with the gory and the unpleasant, evening out the rough patches making it perfect as it could get.

This time however I let it be. For one, this ending might be more near the truth than the one I have in mind, two – changing it would amount to trolling someone else’s story, three – maybe it’s time to let the kids figure out the situation for themselves. I sure was curious to see their reaction – would they accept it like it’s inevitable or ‘normal’ (Yikes!!) or would they feel saddened like I was?

What the kids had to say

The kids completely loved it – the whole story. There were exclamations of ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’ at the idea of all kids having phones and tabs. But there also were ‘haws’ at the idea of no books. They accepted the story in a way more positive manner than what I’d ever imagined. Rather than a black and white approach they found many angles to it. Most said they liked the ending for Santanu’s sake. They liked that Santanu could enjoy being by himself with just books for company. Some said this wasn’t ‘the end’ at all and that finally the kids got bored of their computers after getting a taste of the good stuff and came back.

It’s such joy to watch children think and talk and discuss. Yet one more time I was made to realise how I underestimate the way they think.

A play, a letter and some cards

That’s exactly the kind of a headline that would have drawn the nastiest of frowns from my editor way back when I was working. How cool is it to be your own editor! While on headlines, even the biggies get stuck sometimes. Why else would Shakespeare call one of his works “As You Like It”.

Anyway it’s Christmas and there really is no time for rambling. Since you already know the three things on my mind – a play, a letter and some cards read on..

First – The Play

I haven’t been posting about the Book Club for sometime now. That’s not to say we’ve been idle. There has been plenty of activity. In fact that is exactly why I haven’t found time to post.

Yes, finally the children are putting up a play this Christmas. In the spirit of the festival and in trying to keep everyone happy and involved I’ve gone over the script scores of times to weave in parts that each child wanted. Finally, everyone is pacified and reasonably happy. We now have …
– two narrators (because two kids would be nothing else), 
– a number of good fairies (ALL girls wanted to be fairies), 
– a bunch of evil goblins (Yeah, you’ve guessed it – the boys would be nothing else, much as I hate stereotyping!) 
– and two leads!
Whew!

My door bell hasn’t stopped ringing with queries and complaints. The evil goblins are proving to be really evil and the fairies are giving them fair competition. However, I would like to look at the positive side – the kids ARE working together despite it all. There are walkouts each day and yet the next day they are there again trying to practise, with barely much adult supervision. That’s something that makes me very very proud of them.

Look at the lovely invites they readied.

We’re waiting for D-Day with crossed fingers hoping there are no casualties along the way.

A Letter

This year H and N discovered that there’s no Santa. And so there was much protesting when during a book club meeting I suggested everyone write a letter to him. After some cajoling (encouraged by the pretty printables I downloaded from here) they came up with some interesting ones. I did tell them to think of intangible things. (I heard one of the older ones explaining to a younger one – write about things that are ‘untouchable’ :-)).

I loved what some of them wrote. Much venom was directed at the security guards of our apartment building, who are all just doing their duty, poor souls. Among other requests for craft sets, chocolates and good grades we also had some for a neater country, more respect for girls, help in making their grandma’s room Christmasy and even one for snow in our city!! Awww!!! Isn’t that really sweet.

Do try to get your kids write a letter to Santa. It’s just so much fun and makes for a wonderful read when they grow up.

And finally the cards! 

In case, like us, you have lots of cards to make and are struggling with a deadline you could try this. All you need is some coloured paper, stars to go at the top and a ribbon or simply some more paper for the stems. Cut out triangles, stick them overlapping each other for the tree. Put up the star and the stem and you’re done. Ours are all ready. Don’t they look great?

We’re all set for Christmas. So what have you got lined up? A craft, cooking or baking or carol singing? Do share with us here.
If you’re short of ideas you could check out some of the posts from my fellow bloggers. Do take a look.

Come join a set of fabulous bloggers sharing their Christmas moments – Easy Holiday Crafts, DIY ideas, Recipes , Decor ideas and book recommendations with you .

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