Zara and the Bumbling Genie-Padmini Shankar

Book: Zara and the Bumbling Genie
Author: Padmini Shankar
Publisher: Om Books International

I was provided a media copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

What if you had a friendly genie to help you out with problems?

Eleven-year-old Zara will soon lose her sight unless she undergoes an expensive operation her teacher-parents can’t afford. The devastated girl meets Joom, a runaway genie who’s lost all his magic and is terrified of being discovered by his evil master. Then, when the villainous headmaster of Zara’s school fires her father, Zara and Joom decide to take action. Will Zara regain her sight? Will she avenge her father’s unfair dismissal? And will Joom escape the clutches of his evil owner and regain his magic? Zara and the Bumbling Genie is a story of courage, loyalty, friendship and trust between the most unlikely people.

The book is a wonderfully written story that explores how young Zara is facing problems, both with her eyesight, and the problems with family as her father is unfairly dismissed from the school. Padmini has used simple language, consistent with the target audience for the book, and has also put in meanings of words that might pose a challenge to the younger crowd. Through the conversations between Joom and Zara, the author presents interesting perspectives of what to do when faced with a challenge. She also uses the story to showcase that people who are good at heart triumph in the end. The storytelling is linear and interesting. Padmini has kept the plot relatable to an early teenager using common issues in school. I liked how the author also creates an antagonist in the book while keeping the plot simple. The aspect which could have been improved was that I felt that the book had lesser visual elements which could have been added for a young reader to imagine the scenarios. Another aspect was the similarity of the genie in the book with that in the Arabian Nights stories, even with the images that have been put in. While this has been addressed in the book, I would have loved a different presentation of the genie. The tension in the climax was a nice touch, and I liked how Zara helps Joom in this scenario.

Coming to the characters, the set of characters used to narrate the story were quite good. I liked that each character was given a distinct personality, and that they are quite relatable to the people we usually see around us. The entire character arc of Mr. Boyle was nicely written, and provides good context to the characters of Zara and her parents. While the overall aspect of the character development was nice, the designing and naming of the characters could have been contextualized a bit. While the story is set in Gurugram, we have characters with foreign sounding names such as Mr. Boyle, Mr. Solomon, Adam Butt etc. The surnames felt like a last-minute addition to add the Indian context to the entire story. I believe that this should be addressed in the future editions of the book to make it relatable to the target audience.

Overall, the book has good storytelling, and can be picked up for an early teenager. The book scores a 4.69/5 for me.

Grab a copy of the book from a bookstore near you or on Amazon India.