Aditi Adventures: The City of Lions

Aditi Adventures: The City of Lions (Book #9)
by Suniti Namjoshi
Published by Tulika Publishers

The City of Lions is the ninth book by Suniti Namjoshi in her children’s fantasy book series Aditi Adventures. Suniti, born in the pre-Independence era of India, is known for her poetry and fables.

Aditi Adventures offers the readers a group of friends with magical abilities, supporting each other in different quests and adventures they go on. In this book, The City of Lions, the friends — Aditi, a brave girl with a Sword of Courage; the One-Eyed Monkey who is wise; Siril the Ant with magic clay; Beautiful Ele the elephant with great logical mind; two dragons named Goldie and Opal; Gardy the lion cub and Baby Shark — go on a quest to Singapore. What is the quest that would take these magical beings across the seas and oceans? That is for you to find out by reading this book.

About the book, the story is a drag. I don’t know how else to put it. I dozed off once while reading this sixty five-paged book. That is the downside of writing a fantasy story for children. You either write a great story that imprints itself in young readers’ minds or you let the readers down with so much so that they will never pick that book or any other up again. There is no inbetween. Although I haven’t read the other books in the Aditi Adventures series, there are two ways to see the book I am talking about. One, if a child is reading this book on their own. In this scenario, there is a bare minimum description of how things are going on to support what’s going on. For example, when Gardy the lion cub and his friends leave for The City of Lions i.e. Singapore, only the weather is used to describe their journey. Since this is a children’s book, a little more about what the friends saw on their way, how other living beings are in the places they passed by before reaching their destination and so on would have been great for a child’s imagination. But, these imagination-fuelling descriptions are missing. The second way to see this is as an adult. If an adult is reading this book to a child or children, then and only then, the adult can add evocative voice modulations, gestures and actions to make the story of The City of Lions more interesting.
Speaking of interesting, the only time The City of Lions becomes interesting is towards the end when a special character comes into picture to end the quest. And that is when the story will make sense.

There are two lessons to learn from this book — one for the author and the other for the young readers; to be honest, it is for the adults too.

The first lesson, for the author, is, in fact, a question to her. Was it a good idea, in this tech savvy dog-eat-dog world, for the author to write a children’s book in which the characters go on a quest without knowledge of who was contacting them via email and the reason why they were invited to a far away land, The City of Lions? We see everyday how adults are being duped into transferring all their hard earned money to strangers they meet online. In such times we live, and the author chose to use a similar situation to make a group of friends start their journey to a far away land. Children are very impressionable. They learn from what people around them do. Irrespective of what magical powers these characters in the book have and their ability to save themselves from different difficult situations, imagine what would happen if the impressionable powerless kids read The City of Lions?
The second lesson, for the children and adults. It is not to misuse the powers one has. Along with this, the reader may also learn how mitigation should work.

The illustrations in the book are average. As it is the book doesn’t ignite any kind of imagination in the readers, the illustrations don’t do much to uplift the narration. On top of it, the front page of the book says the pictures (illustrations) are by Proiti Roy, but there is no sign of her along with the author bio on the back cover. Instead, there is someone named Shefalee Jain mentioned and not sure how she has contributed to the making of The City of Lions.

If I have to recommend The City of Lions to anyone, it would be based on the second lesson I have mentioned above. However, the negatives of this book outweigh the only good thing. Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend The City of Lions – Book #9 in the Aditi Adventures series for any child. If you decide to buy it, then please read it to your child(ren) instead of giving the book to them to read on their own.