How about giving old fairy tales a new spin in an Indian setting? In her debut book of fiction for children aged between eight and 12, author Shobita Narayan leads her readers into a village named Gol Gumbad. An old mage visits the village and grants magical powers to the children, sparking a series of events. Through six standalone tales that are interlinked to form a larger narrative, she builds a world with magic in Midaash & Maitreyi’s Magical Mayhem (Scholastic India publication, available on e-commerce platforms and bookstores).
Shobhita reimagines Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Pied Piper, The Three Little Pigs, The Snow Queen, and The Selfish Giant in an imaginary world within India.
The author, who divides her time between Hyderabad and New Delhi, says the book was a happy accident. She had been working on a dark adult fantasy fiction series for a decade but felt it had hit a stumbling block. “Sometime in 2022, I realised that the book was not coming together as I expected it to,” she recalls. She then revisited a short story she had written in her college days as a spin-off of Rapunzel. “I thought let me play around with it and it organically took on a new life of its own. Once I had bid goodbye to my initial idea of an adult fantasy series, this set of fantasy stories for children took shape and I enjoyed exploring a new realm as a writer.”
