“If you go looking for adventure, you will find it.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Ruskin Bond’s new Rusty adventure is slightly darker than the previous ones. It’s ten years down the road and Rusty is older and his friends are busy with school ending exams. Rusty, however, is not ready to settle down to college – he wants to explore the mysterious Witch Mountain, though not on his own. He sets out with his friends Pitambar and Popatand runs into those old fashioned kind of adventures that most children aren’t fortunate enough to encounter in books these days – man eating tigers, a blood sucking cat and half way up a mountain a supposed rani who turns out to be a witch. There is also a beautiful princess.
All these light-hearted ingredients however combine to make a Grimm’s Fairy Tale type of story with dark undercurrents. The witch rani has a murder of crows at her beck and call and she condemns Rusty and his friends to a diet of endless bananas and refuses to release them unless they bring her a singing stone which can only be found near the top of the mountain in a region plagued by earthquakes.
