Authored by a friend!

pic courtesy tulikabooks

Have You Seen This?
Text by Arthi Anand Navaneeth
Illustrated by Roomani Kulkarni
Published by Tulika books (bilinguals)
Ages 3+

I came home with A from her school bus-stop, and a parcel was waiting for me. I had a fair idea as to its contents, as I had been expecting my review copy from Tulika. The kid pounced on it when I told her what it was, and tore open the wrapping. There she stood, with her bag and shoes still on, giggling as she read through it!

Arthi Anand Navaneeth, Saffrontree’s own Artnavy, has brought us the wacky, the whimsical, the quirky, even the outlandish in this completely giggle-worthy book. A book bang-on in the premise of fiction, even fantasy- suspending disbelief, and even believing the unbelievable!

“A chair that jumps? 
A tree that flies? 
A crow that cooks?” 

A friend who came over read it to her 2 ½ year old in front of me, and his reaction was equally giggle-worthy. The child was transfixed, with his mouth open, and saying “Yes!”, “No!” : acting out some stuff and laughing out really loud at places. It was interesting to note what he said “Yes” to. Those were the ones he has seen as the anthropomorphised characters doing similar wacky things in other stories or on the TV. So these were clearly things that children around his age seemed to think were possible- spot on for the target age group of the book.

Illustrations by Roomani Kulkarni are a huge part of the book’s appeal. I did a search for this artist, who I had not heard of before, and I was amazed by some of her other work. In the book, the eye looks at a picture on a new page first, travelling next to the words which explains it all, just a single sentence on each page. The pair of children romping around the narrative reminded us for some reason of ET, the extra-terrestrial!

The book is the newest in the Tulika books' series of bilingual books, and ours was a Marathi-English combo, thoughtfully sent by Tulika and Arthi, as we speak Marathi at home. A had as much fun tripping over reading the Devnagari script that she has learnt in Hindi at school, and then smoothing out the prounciation into the familiar Marathi. Our personal favourite? The book that reads!:)

We're proud of you, Artnavy!

Crossposted at Saffrontree.