The first title of a new series by Shobhaa Dé for teenagers ticks the boxes, but stays lifeless.
This is the first of a series by Shobhaa Dé written for teenage Indian readers, primarily girls who are, in the facetious sum-up of a television anchor, “too old for toys and too young for boys”.
There aren’t too many books written specifically for this large class of readers, books that talk to them in their own language and address their concerns. Which is why most children in that age group may still be reading Enid Blyton, if they aren’t on to Harry Potter already. So there’s some ground, from a marketing point at any rate, for a series such as this.
Books, however, have a disconcerting habit of eluding the best-laid plans of marketers and publishers, even novels that are essentially formula-driven like these.
So it is with S’s Secret, which has been set afloat on Dé’s celebrity status but might well be grounded because it fails in one essential aspect — literary merit.
Given that it is written for young readers, it is necessarily shorn of the salaciousness that is Dé’s forte. (Anyway, by their teens, the girls are reading Mills & Boon.) The plot is non-existent, revolving around the (largely imagined) trials of a south Mumbai adolescent, Sandhya. It’s a subject which one would imagine Dé, as a mother of grown up kids, knows well. She flags all the major grouses — pimples, strict parents, pesky siblings, crushes, body image issues — but in a stream of hysteric exclamations and half-questions that is irritating.
The main problem is that Sandhya just does not come alive. She remains a cardboard type, lifeless... so you really couldn’t care less about the mystery of her secret.
