“Lavanya Sankaran has packed plots and counter plots into this story of family with a difference.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Another in the Ninja Nani series this Hinglish potboiler combines comic strip visuals sound effects and the easy on the eye text that today’s children, more used to screens than to book pages, prefer to go through. What children will love is the concept of the grandmother as secret superhero, playing pranks on her son with her superpowers at the breakfast table while her grandson Deepu gapes in horrified awe in case his granny is unmasked.
The problem that emerges in Garbadnagar centres around the Ladies Fete which the Mayor has declared too boring to survive, something that children familiar with aunties and their charity fetes will giggle at. To keep the fete active the President has invited celebrity Chef D to meet the Mystery Hero who saved him from falling down on his TV set and has made him the centre of a cooking contest – this despite thefact that no one knows who the mystery hero really is.
At the same time there is an evil villain called Agma who belongs to the world of TV cartoon shows and who is possibly the toughest force that Ninja Nani has battled. And there is a whole bunch of would-be Mystery Heroes swinging from trees and pretending to be the real thing.
Lavanya Sankaran has packed plots and counter plots into this story of family with a difference, throwing in the media world and everything that relates to the society we live in, including the trend for celebrity chefs and their home cook followers. At one level it’s all about good and bad conflict thrown into a melting pot!
Reviewed by:
Anjana Basu
Added 24th June 2021
