“You’ve seen him set fire to his hair, head-butt a teacher, score an own goal, send his chicken-curry-soaked bat flying . . . Can things get any crazier? With Amar, they can!”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Butterfingers Amar is your usual schoolboy, clumsier than most, who announces his presence with a crash. Khyrunnisa A created Amar for the children’s comic Tinkle and went on to expand him into a popular series of children’s books. Amar’s clumsiness has been turned to advantage – without being a detective, he literally stumbles onto all kinds of solutions.
In this new book of stories, he bumbles his way through a school play with ghosts, saves a bank with his roller skates and manages to break the Principal’s hip but ends that incident happily. Amar adventures are mainly set in the context of the Green Park School, where he and his classmates tumble through the ups and downs of school and home life. There is the ‘intellectual’ Kishore who reshuffles Shakespeare with hilarious effect and who actually takes the attention away from Amar in the first story and various other sidekicks who pop up at the perfect time. The shorter stories in the Misadventures series were actually originally comic strips, though the first remains the best, matched perhaps by the roller skating one.
Khyrunnisa. A spins a novel series of ways in which clumsiness can be used to advantage, given the life of a young schoolboy – though one does wonder how Amar’s parents survive frequent crashing plates or even bear to buy new ones!
Reviewed by:
Anjana Basu
Added 19th June 2016
