A heartfelt but meandering tale about a resourceful Indian student.
A fourth-grader helps underprivileged kids and learns a valuable lesson in this debut children’s novel.
Although Sona is smart and attends a prestigious international school in India, her grades aren’t what her mother expects. Often, the girl lacks focus and constantly wonders about the world around her. On her mother’s birthday, Sona and her parents visit an orphanage. Later, Sona worries about the orphans’ education and well-being. Her mother, who works for an organization teaching underprivileged kids, explains that children can get a good education anywhere— “where they get it is secondary.” Still, Sona wants to help. With the assistance of teachers, parents, and friends, she ensures that deprived and orphaned children participate in One Spectrum, her school’s extracurricular competition. Sona also urges Aunt Nyla, her mother’s friend and colleague, to help a boy named Pawan, who works at a tea stall. Despite Pawan’s limited education and poverty, he joins Sona’s community, inspiring many with his intelligence, cartography skills, and humility. One Spectrum is a huge success and Sona realizes that education and wealth don’t equal superiority. In this novel, Upadhyay offers a heartwarming message that emphasizes the importance of empathy, education, and literacy. A short, helpful glossary of terms is also included. The narrative delivers some nice lines like “Sona lived in an imaginative world where butterflies hovered over math textbooks and pencils danced.” But other literary devices are unusual (“Earth was a plump girl who…asked…the planets to get her desserts…if the planets did not bribe Earth by providing…desserts, she would say negative things about them”). Some significant facts are randomly inserted in the text rather than smoothly incorporated into the story. For example, Upadhyay describes late in the book how Sona’s mother lived in an orphanage as a kid. Integrated into the tale early on, this background would have added an intriguing element to Sona’s character. And topics and settings sometimes oddly skip around within the same paragraphs and sentences (“After spending the day with…children, she returned home. At 9 p.m., the party had just begun…guests were arriving at the venue”).
A heartfelt but meandering tale about a resourceful Indian student.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5437-0173-9
Page Count: 66
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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