Book Report: ROOM ON THE ROOF!

This book is called, ‘ ROOM ON THE ROOF’ written by Ruskin Bond. It is about an orphaned boy named Rusty who has no real family after his parents’ death. He is very lonely and sad and even though he lives with his guardian (Mr. John Harrison), he doesn’t feel at home. Rusty is going through several emotions; he is confused, obliged, helpless, lonely and sad.  He is confused because he is a young boy between the age of an adult and child and doesn’t know who to follow or what his future holds. He is obliged to follow the orders and rules of his guardian and dares not disobey him. He feels helpless because he knows that if he disobeys Mr. John, he will get caned. Rusty doesn’t have any real friends and he is so very lonely in his guardian’s house. Even though Rusty is half Indian, John doesn’t let Rusty near the bazaar for a reason : John thinks that Indians are very dirty and this story is written just after the British had ruled over India, so he must have felt more superior! One day, Rusty decides to get some fresh air and takes a walk while his guardian was away to Delhi. After walking through the forest, he stops in front of the bazaar and his mind is arguing with his instinct. His mind is saying, ‘Don’t go! You will get into trouble.’ but his instinct is saying, ‘Go! You have your own heart and mind. You don’t have to live under rules all the time.’ Rusty chooses to follow his instinct and steps into the bazaar. He has made a good choice. Up until now, Rusty doesn’t have any hope or confidence but then he meets a kind boy named Somi and makes friends with him. Somi and his friends become Rusty’s hope and confidence and Somi and Ranbir are really kind to Rusty. When Rusty returns home, he finds that his guardian has returned early and gets caned for going to the bazaar. The next day, he goes to play Holi with Ranbir and once again gets caned. Rusty now knows what he has to do. He starts to live his own life and runs away from his guardian’s house. Rusty finds Somi who supports him a lot. Slowly, from a confused boy, Rusty turns into a confident and independent young man! He gets a job teaching English to a boy named Kishen, in return for a tiny room on the roof and food. He finds a loving and fun family, his independence, and even finds his ‘first love’ in Kishen’s mother Meena. The story takes a turn, when he loses all his friends and his first love too. Now Rusty’s last source of confidence and hope has gone away and his lonely days return. Rusty spends his sad days looking out at the window and once again, plans to run away. He decides to go back to England but before doing so, he wants to say a last goodbye to his friends and finds Kishen who convinces him to change his mind about returning to the UK. Instead, the two walk away together to form their own new world and life without worrying about anything else.

What I like about the book:

• I like this book because it was written from a teenager’s perspective. The author was seventeen when he wrote this and the story was inspired by his own experiences when he lived in Dehra. He wrote this story because he too was feeling some of the emotions that Rusty was feeling in the story. And for that reason, he decided that he would never make any revisions so readers could understand how it feels to be seventeen.  (mentioned in the Introduction by Ruskin Bond himself)
• It was a great read because it has a lot of different emotions and I like the way Ruskin Bond has written it : a simple story made into such a touching and sad book.
• There were a few funny descriptions like when Ruskin Bond described a situation as, ‘When a butterfly landed on the missionary’s wife’s palatial bosom….’ I laughed a lot and when my mum read it, she also laughed.  
• After reading the Room on The Roof, I am looking forward to reading a few of Ruskin Bond’s other stories. I wonder why children of my generation don’t read more of his books. Here are some books I am interested in reading from his collection :  ‘Panther’s Moon and Other Stories’, ‘The Hidden Pool’, ‘Rusty goes to London’ etc..
• I think the author has explained an important message in this book. Rusty’s guardian seems to be a little racist, who chooses to live in India but not mix with the people there. I think if people live in a country, they should mix with the people and appreciate their culture.
• The lesson in this story for me is to remain open as Rusty was and to follow my instincts. If Rusty had not becomes friends with the people of the bazaar he would never have had all the wonderful experiences in the story.
• Ruskin Bond reminds me of Roald Dahl because they both use interesting language and really funny phrases to describe their characters and their stories. They both write simple but wonderful stories. Even though, Roald Dahl is more fantastical and Ruskin Bond’s stories feel like memoirs but presented as a story.

I WOULD GIVE THIS BOOK A 9 OUT OF 10 RATING!

FIND OUT WHAT I MEAN BY READING THE ROOM ON THE ROOF!

YOU CAN BUY IT HERE ON AMAZON FOR $ 0.54 !

This book report was posted on The Guardian's site first.

Disclaimer: If you would like to read this book, I recommend that you ask your parents first.

Book Report : QUINNY AND HOPPER

 This book is called ‘QUINNY AND HOPPER’ written by Adriana Brad Schanen. It is about two friends named Quinny and Hopper. Quinny is moving from New York to a place called Whisper Valley and doesn’t like it at all. She is moving with her parents and her two younger sisters named Piper and Cleo who are very annoying. Quinny doesn’t appreciate them much especially because Piper spies on her and Cleo licks her with her spit! Eeww! When Quinny reaches Whisper Valley, she finds a new friend named Hopper who is a quiet boy and is extremely shy at first but opens up later. Quinny’s personality is almost the complete opposite. She is a chatty, active and impulsive character. Even though the two are the total opposites, they still make a great team. Each one’s personality helps the other: Hopper’s cleverness helps Quinny learn new things and Quinny’s friendliness and activeness makes Hopper less shy. Together, the two have a lot of fun doing fun things like chasing and catching chickens etc.. Then, Quinny and Hopper both receive a letter telling them that their school is starting. Quinny is very excited but Hopper isn’t and claims that everything about their friendship will end. The reason he says this is because he doesn’t have any friends in school and thinks that Quinny won’t want to be his friend and would want to move on with her life. Quinny is shocked for a few days with Hopper’s new attitude but then forces herself to think that Hopper never even was her friend in the first place. As Hopper thinks she would, Quinny moves on with her life and chooses a wrong type of friend. They go to school and once again, Hopper is lonely. He sits on the staircase and reads his book. Meanwhile, Quinny and her new friend, Victoria, are playing and Victoria starts to be mean and bossy with Quinny but Quinny is helpless. On the other hand, Hopper has finally overcome his shyness and found a game that he likes. He becomes the new champion in a running game called Tag and even goes and tags Quinny because he feels like he wants to be her friend again and that he can sort a few things out. Quinny swirls around and argues with Hopper a little at first, but then finally starts to play with him. Victoria teases them and Quinny pushes her away. Quinny and Hopper are both very annoyed with Victoria and feel like paying her back for all the bossy things she does. They also feel glad and less confused because they are back together and have nothing to worry about regarding the safety of their friendship. Quinny tells Hopper that he should never think that she won’t be his friend because she will always with be with him. Their friendship starts to heal. Now, from an unsure and confused friendship, Quinny and Hopper have turned into a really strong friendship.

What I like about this book is:

• As soon as I picked ‘Quinny and Hopper’, I knew it would be a winner. From the first page, I could not stop reading it till the book was done.
• This book follows a simple story line: two friends, a problem, the friends are not good friends anymore and then something happens to make them realise the value of their friendship and they become friends again. It is a simple story line which turns into such an interesting book with 2 very different perspectives.
• One thing that I really liked about the book was how the author has organised and written the chapters. Each chapter is either called ‘Quinny’ or ‘Hopper’ and whichever name it is, that becomes the perspective it is written in. It was interesting to see both the views and the feel of the chapters is so different from each other. “Quinny” chapters are fast and as you read it, you will hear yourself go  fast. “Hopper” chapters feel more quiet and careful and you will notice it in the way the author writes.
• When I read ‘Quinny and Hopper’, I could relate to my real life because the story is like two friends of mine. One friend is trying to steal the other friend away from me but fortunately the friend keeps coming back! Being 8-12 is a difficult and confusing time I think and this book captures that well.
• I think the book has a great sense of humour and tragedy too. Humour, such as, there is a conversation in the book with Quinny and her dad and Quinny asks her dad why they even have her sisters and her dad says, “I know. We took them with us and I think we might have to stick with them.” LOL! And tragic too because at one point in the story, you really feel sorry for Hopper.
• Overall, it’s a very good book and is easy to understand. I would recommend it to ages 8-12 because they mostly have problems like these and can relate to it and even take a lesson from it.
• Finally, Fun quiz time! Here are a few questions for those who have read the book. Write your answers in the section below my report. Oh! and no cheating, alright? J  

1.  What are the names of Hopper’s bullying brothers?

2. What is Quinny’s full name?

3. Who is Mrs. Porridge?

4. How many teeth does Quinny have?

5. What does Hopper love and what is his room full of?

I WOULD GIVE THIS BOOK A 10 OUT 10 RATING!

FIND OUT WHAT I MEAN BY READING QUINNY AND HOPPER!

YOU CAN BUY IT HERE ON AMAZON FOR $6.99!

Book Report: THE YEAR OF BILLY MILLER!

This book is called ‘THE YEAR OF BILLY MILLER’ written by Kevin Henkes. It is based in The Year Of The Rabbit (as per the Chinese calendar) and is about an unsure boy named Billy who is just about to start Grade 2 and doesn’t have any faith in himself. Something that I noticed is that this book has 4 parts : Teacher, Father, Sister, Mother. Each is their own little story. Each story is about Billy’s relationship with the family member mentioned and each relationship helps to build Billy’s year and overcome his shyness. In one of the incidents, he is misunderstood by his teacher, Ms. Silver and he goes home and tries to think about how to clear the misunderstanding. Billy comes up with an idea and gathers all silver things like a nickel, a paper clip and a silver rabbit to give to Ms. Silver to show her that he didn’t mean to offend her. In the part of Father, Billy’s dad is still waiting for his breakthrough (an example of achieving success in a particular activity.) and Billy helps him by giving him an excellent idea. Billy has many adventures which help him to instill confidence in himself and one cute one is in the part of Sister. It is about Billy’s little sister named Sal and how Billy wants to achieve something by staying awake all night. He wakes Sal up and manages to keep her interested in staying awake and he proves to himself that he can do whatever he sets his mind on. The last part is Mother and it is about how Ms. Silver announces the learning celebration programme and Billy is asked to write a poem about a family member. Billy chooses his mom and comes up with a poem that goes like this:

Quiet Mom by Billy Miller

My mom likes a lot

She likes quiet best

Quiet can be loud if you listen

Quiet sounds like this

cars

sprinklers

bugs

wind

Quiet is a dead bird

Billy presents it on stage and that itself is a huge achievement but at the end, Billy reflects on how much he has grown in the year and picks  up all his courage to go up on stage to say, ‘This is the year of Billy Miller.’

What I like about this book:

• I read this book as it had a medal on it and it turned out pretty good. Most of the Kevin Henkes books (e.g. Chrysanthemum and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse) are also related to this same lesson as in this book: Believe in yourself, always!
• I didn’t have time to read it all in one go, so, I kept reading little parts but when I did finish it, I was very happy that I had chosen this book because, as a writer, I learnt a lot of interesting words that maybe I could add to my writing like ‘mesmerized’, ‘crabby’ etc..
• In this book, the author was writing with the five senses. At one point,  he describes Billy, his sister and their babysitter in a restaurant and what they felt. In fact, I was picturing myself in the restaurant looking at lanterns and other stuff. Like a film going on in my mind.
• I would recommend this book for children and adults alike … for those who sometimes give up really easily and don’t think they can do it. Sometimes, I feel like that too, but after reading this book, I am trying to stay positive.
• Something that I have noticed when I read ‘The Year Of Billy Miller’ is that the author uses an animal to help explain things in the story. One of my observations in many of his other stories is that he uses a lot of animals too. He probably finds the example of animals an easy way to explain complicated things to his young readers.

I WOULD GIVE THIS BOOK AN 8 OUT OF 10 RATING!

FIND OUT WHAT I MEAN BY READING THE YEAR OF BILLY MILLER!

Book Report : I AM MALALA

This book is called I AM MALALA, written by Malala Yousafzai. So, it is an autobiography. Malala is a world changer and this is her story. She is born in Pakistan, Mingora and is a Pashtun from birth. She, unlike other girls, is very lucky and has a very supportive father who owns a school. Suddenly, a man named Fazlullah starts talking about stopping girls from going to school and keeping women at home on the radio. Then, one day, when she sees children working at the garbage dump instead of being at school, she realizes that she has to do something about it. Malala and her school friends are always talking about what they heard on the radio and get really scared when something even worse happens. Fazlullah forms the Taliban and starts doing bad stuff to women in Afghanistan. He has now said that women should not be allowed out of the house without a known male accompanying her.  If they went out without a male relative, or without wearing a proper burqa (a top to bottom black dress), he and his followers threw acid on their face! Malala is now really upset and when she starts to see that the Taliban have come to Mingora and are putting banners up which are stopping women from coming out of their houses without a male person, she starts to talk to God and asks Him about how she can help. One day, Malala wakes up and has an idea. She will ignore the chat about the Taliban and instead talk about the things girls her age should be talking about, like, TV shows, friends and what I’m going to do on the weekend etc. But now the Taliban is becoming even crueler: they are scolding women if they don’t wear a burqa and they are beating up men if they are not accompanying their wife and daughter. Mingora was becoming an unsafe place! One of Malala’s father’s friends in the news channel BBC now wants a girl to write a journal about how she feels about the Taliban and how her life is. Malala is keen on it and gets a pseudonym: Gul Makai a Pashtun folktale character. One day, Malala’s father finds a note on the door of his room saying ‘Close down this school otherwise you know what we can do!’ Malala’s father wrote back ‘Please don’t kill my students. You can hurt me but not my students.’ Malala has now had many interviews and has the chance to talk against the Taliban and she says that the only thing she wants is for girls to have a right to learn, have good education and grow up to be whatever they want to be. Little did she know that the Taliban was hearing all this and following her. Soon, she became a target for the Taliban and on the bus, on the way home, she got shot right near the brain. Malala declares that she doesn’t remember any of it: the shooting, bleeding, going to 4 different hospitals, none of it. Instantly, Malala was moved to a hospital in Mingora, which said that she needed special treatments to be done. Then she was moved to Peshawar. There, there happened to be two special doctors, Dr. Fiona and Dr. Javid. She was moved to Rawalpindi and then to Birmingham, England to the ‘Queen Elizabeth Hospital’. When Malala woke up she couldn’t speak because there was a tube in her throat. She received a pink notebook and a white teddy bear. The pink notebook was to write all her questions and what she wanted to say and the teddy bear was to comfort her. Malala couldn’t hear properly, was seeing double, couldn’t close her left eye, couldn’t move her left hand and whenever she shook her head had an intense pain there. After a long time in the hospital, she was a little bit stronger and her sight was much better. The doctors inserted a small hearing device in her ear so that she could hear better and she started to live in Birmingham with her family. One afternoon, in the middle of her physics lesson, the headmistress called her outside and Malala thought ‘what happened? Am I in trouble?’. In fact, she was not in trouble at all! She had won the Nobel Prize along with one other man. That was when she realized how much her teachers in Birmingham cared for her because they had tears in their eyes. Malala was invited to talk to the whole school and even before that to the UN! Malala now is on many news channels and still has speeches and interviews. E.g.: She had one with Christian Amanpour on CNN and with many other people. Malala is such a strong person, a world changer!

What I like about the b0ok:

• I was so hooked on to the book that I finished it in one day! It is a very inspiring book to me.
• I find it a co-incidence that the lesson Malala found in the ‘Wizard Of Oz’ book is the lesson that I found in this book: if you really want to do something, you will get to it even with the hurdles on your way.
• Isn’t it amazing how a child, especially a child, can have the courage to speak up against such a bad group when it is that sort of time when what is going to happen next is unpredictable?
• She must have had such a hard life doing chores at home in Mingora and managing to keep her cool with her ‘annoying brothers’ etc. But I think the hardest part of her life was when the Taliban said that they were forced to shoot her because she was speaking against them. But in spite of this they continued to not let women do what they want in their own free will.
• What I find unfair about what they are doing is that they are saying it is part of their religion when actually it’s not.
• I know this is not part of what I learnt but I was amazed at how good her description was. I could almost imagine how her bedroom looked like and how the alley where she played cricket looked like and other things she described looked like.
• I would love to meet MalalaJ! Since I read this book by myself, my mum and I had a chat about it and I landed up asking myself ‘what would I do if I had the opportunity like Malala? I said all sorts of different things but I couldn’t get to one that would change the world. If you did something like Malala, what would it be?

I would give this book a 9 out of 10 rating.

FIND OUT WHAT I MEAN BY READING I AM MALALA!

YOU CAN BUY IT HERE ON AMAZON FOR $8.44 and HERE ON GUARDIAN BOOKSHOP FOR £6.39

Note : This Review was first published at the Guardian Teen Books site