Anni's India Diary

This is a great book if you're planning a trip to India with children aged 4-11, or if you've been to India with them and you want to help them recapture the experience. (I'm not sure what children who have no other connection to India would make of it.) My son is four and loves the book in spite of all the text. He's been to India, and so have his parents. The wonderful jumble of drawings (mostly quite accurate--must have been either on-site or from a good photo collection) and collage is captivating enough that I think most youngsters would be capable of sitting through the lengthy text, though the diary format is a little awkward for reading aloud. There are occasional minor inaccuracies (the library review above correctly points out the "puja" problem... but then, this book doesn't pose as an encyclopedia entry), but as children's books on India go, this one's on the more accurate side of the scale. What's most impressive is the girl's eagerness to meet children from another place, culture, and economic class. She makes friends in a way that seems genuinely non-judgemental. (She and her family chat with a poor pavement dweller in Calcutta, an incense worker in Mysore, a fruitseller on the beach in Goa...)

India is a large and diverse country, the home of many ancient and interesting cultures. This book is the travel dialog of a young girl named Anni as she travels through India with her mom and dad. They travel by train, bus, camel and elephant. There are many illustrations and they illustrate the daily street life of India. You see people bathing in the Ganges River, carts being pulled by oxen, people cooking their food in the streets, street vendors hawking their wares, children at school under a tree, and the clothes that the Indians wear. What was most interesting were the pictures of products they encountered in India. Postage stamps, matches, cameras, railway tickets, lottery tickets, honey, fireworks, fabrics, hotel receipts and other products that I did not recognize. An excellent introduction to India written for young people, this book demonstrates some of the variety and vitality of a country whose culture was old when the first white people landed in North America.

This is a great book! My son is 9 years old and went to India a couple of years ago. This book vividly brought back all his memories. What I liked best was that even though it is not written by an Indian, it is so authentic. The illustrations are just great! I highly recommend it.