Saved by a pumpkin

Oops the Mighty Gurgle (Duckbill, Rs 199) by RamG Vallath begins with a flying whale and a pumpkin emerging from its mouth. This pumpkin is no ordinary pumpkin; he is Oops the Mighty Gurgle, who has to save the universe and who would say “Ooee bree gurr?” to you if he met you. (“Ooee bree gurr” translates into “Can I jump on your head?”, which, we are told, is a “very polite Gurglese greeting, showing a desire to be friends with someone.”) Since the evil groinks — “porcine green grunters” — are intent on taking over Earth, it has fallen upon Oops, his human assistants, Chuck and Kia, and Floppy the dog to save the planet. Oops has to overcome quite a lot of obstacles on the way. He has to deal with black holes, time travel and “amorous emperor penguins”. At one point, he also had to watch “in shock as groink after groink stripped off their clothes and jumped into the mud. He was horrified to see that the groinkesses were doing the same. This level of social permissiveness... was something he was not used to. Gurgles wore garments only on their legs, but taking that off in public was quite unthinkable.”

What works for Oops the Mighty Gurgle, apart from its humour, is that it has in generous dollops everything that children’s books in India desperately need: improbability and utter silliness. Vallath’s sense of humour is healthy; he takes the familiar ‘whenever mankind is in trouble, a hero emerges’ trope and turns it into a work of delightful creativity, complete with a hero who is a pumpkin. This book will appeal to readers of all ages.

Small Screen, Big Lies (Wisdom Village, Rs 150) by Kish is the author’s attempt to emulate Jackie Collins. Small Screen, Big Lies would remind one of Hollywood Wives, sans Collins’ s clever titillations and sordid suspense. Steve Saunders, the television host, has “a killer smile, lucrative career and a different woman to sleep with every night”. His Indian, protégé, Abhish, is in love with the “mysterious” Chloe, who, it turns out, has nothing more mysterious than a crazy ex-husband. Kish tries very hard to weave in the lives of his characters in that effortless, Collins-esque way, but fails spectacularly. At the end, all you are left with is an insipid mystery, the solution to which you can guess without having to trudge even halfway through the book.

Blood Red Sari (HarperCollins, Rs 299) by Ashok Banker is the first book in the Kali Rising series, and is described as a “pulse-pounding action thriller with a feminist punch”. If this does not strike you as pretentious, the author’s descriptions of the “murky underbelly” of India’s metropolises certainly will. The ‘missing’ social activist, Lalima, has chosen three women to bring her adversaries to justice. The owner of a women-only gym in Calcutta, a wheelchair-bound Delhi lawyer and a Malayali private sleuth make up this deadly trio. While the actual identities of the “adversaries” remain irritatingly unclear, the story’s premise is promising and could have been handled interestingly. But in his zeal to make the prose sound ‘gritty’ — Banker writes, for no good reason, about stray bitches with swollen genitalia oozing blood — the author loses focus, and his heroines, their story.

Howard’s Gift: Uncommon wisdom to inspire your life’s work (St Martin’s, Rs 499) by Eric C. Sinoway and Merrill Meadow has nothing remotely uncommon about it. Howard Stevenson — whose “wisdom” is the topic of this book — may have been a “towering figure” at Harvard Business School, but the authors, in their enthusiasm to prove that Stevenson’s teachings at business school can benefit the average reader as well, forget that real life cannot be run like a business venture.