In Search of the Great Indian YA book
When I started working as the Kids editor at Time Out Mumbai, reviewing children’s books soon became one of the most exciting parts of my job. Suddenly my desk was groaning under copies of picture books, middle grade fiction and non-fiction and YA novels. A steady diet of Enid Blyton, and Archie and Tintin comics, it was like crawling through a musty cupboard and entering into a whole new world of literature.
I quickly became drawn to the Young Adult books, maybe because in some ways it was the easiest to transition to. What really also was interesting was that like JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, these books too had a crossover audience – being read by not only teenagers but also adults. The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, for instance, sent them in a frenzy of Team Jacob versus Te...