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Favourite Stories for
Girls
There are tales for the skeptic and tales for the romantic, tales with frills and tales without any, but they definitely all stand tall by themselves and not one of them fails to fulfil its purpose—be it to amuse you or draw you into a contemplative mood. In fact, anyone can really enjoy these stories where the girls, who may be on the margins of the everyday world, stay firmly in the centre of its pages all through. There is a teen beauty queen called Plumpie who is spunky enough to play football on an all-boys’ team, along with her cat (this opening story is also important because it is narrated from a dog’s point of view and dogs, as you know, are far from being in the centre of things). There is a budding detective, Bela, who solves a mystery that hardly was. But the real fun in this story lies in the footnotes which over-explain everything and ‘become’ the real heroine. Two more stories ‘starring’ Kavita and Uma have girls reigning supreme in the world of fantasy as well. With Maggi, the girl with a name like a noodle, you are thrown into the world of ‘solid reality’ with a thud. It is a bitter-sweet tale of a girl who lives mostly in her mind, which is what most sensitive people end up doing when they find the world to be a pretty narrow place to fit in. Sreela, on the other hand, writes her heart out to her best friend, which happens to be her diary. ‘Shortly’, yes, that’s a name, makes you say ‘Chak de’ all the way with her courage. Similarly inspiring is the tale of Govindi, a village girl, who wants to shred apart the existing systems like most of us and gets lucky. Champa and Amandi both have to thank their benevolent stars for the change in their fortunes while Rika discovers to her surprise that she can actually change people’s fortune with a swoosh of her scissors. The pages all throb with the excitement that a volume for adolescents should have. If names impress you, the contributors are all well-known names from the world of children’s fiction—Manjula Padmanabhan, Poile Sengupta, Chatura Rao et al. So, now you know what little girls are really made up of.
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It’s all so pink and
sweet and laced with emotions that you’d mistake it for a birthday
cake for your charming little darling, but this collection of stories
takes the cake (pun intended) for being as true as it can be to the
title. This volume indeed has all the right ingredients to become a
favourite with all the tweenies and the teenies. But I would really not
shoo away an adult from reading these by describing them as merely ‘oh,
so shweet!’