“Sen dramatises the plight of a lonely tiger in a manner that children will relate to.”
NO MAJOR SPOILERS
Benita’s Sen’s picture book in verse has a very important message to convey. It tells the story of a lonely tiger who has no one else to play with. He is the only one of his kind left. And, as lonely children do he tries to fill in his empty hours.
The things he does all children will relate to – he plays with his shadow, jumps, skips and takes up with elephants, birds and jackals with varying results.
Sen’s narrative is in verse, a skipping kind of beat that might make children imitate the tiger’s motions and these are backed by Mukherjee’s pictures which have something about Hobbes to them.
Sen dramatises the plight of a lonely tiger in a manner that children will relate to, a creature faced with the prospect of finding no home since the trees are being cut down.
Sen has no solutions except to have her tiger leave the planet – a metaphor perhaps for the extinction of the species?
Presumably when read out, it will have the effect of getting children to ask ‘why?’ The question is, are there answers to the problem?
Reviewed by:
Anjana Basu
Added 13th August 2019
