19 July 2023

📕The Serpent’s secret
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
👧🏻 Young adult
✍️ Sayantani DasGupta
✨ Mythology, fantasy, sci-fi, and fiction
I have read many Indian folktale books. When I saw this book, I thought that it had nothing to do with India unless you count the character as Indian, but oh BOY was I wrong!!
Kiranmala is a 12-year-old immigrant living in the USA. Her parents keep on saying she is a real princess and other crazy stuff. Every Halloween (when it’s also her birthday) she HAS to dress up like an Indian princess.
On her 12th birthday, Kiranmala is caught by surprise as a rakkhosh , an Indian daemon kidnaps her parents, and two princes come and save her. Fun fact, we call it rakshasa where I come from.
In their quest for saving the parents, they enter another dimension that looks like ancient India, and here Kiranmala learns the truth about her parents and must save them from…well let me stop here to not spoil the story for you. But I can tell you it’s a secret worth reading the book!
When I read this book, I felt proud of my Indian ancestry as we have a rich tradition of storytelling across all our different languages and subcultures. This is because, the book draws its inspiration from many Indian folktales such as Panchatantra and stories of rakshasas, and surprisingly astronomy. Fun fact, did you know there are more than 121 languages in India that are spoken by at least 10,000 people or more? Each with its own rich culture and tradition of stories and storytelling!
Usually, books like this don’t come with illustrations, and it surprised me a lot, that there were small illustrations approximately once each chapter!
The book was very funny, especially with this bird called Tuntuni who kept on telling bad jokes and dreamy poems. Don’t worry Tuntuni! I’ll save your bad jokes to my friends!
I feel sad that there was no map of this dimension. It would have been fun to look at it and see where we were.
Finally, I recommend it to kids who want to enjoy a really good story while getting introduced to Indian culture a bit, all over the world.
What is your favorite thing about India?
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