Do you believe in ghosts? Do you like reading about ghostly encounters? If the answer to these two questions is yes, then pick up The Haunted School and Other Stories by Nandini Nayar. Just three stories, that hold your attention from the very beginning.
Imagine walking into your classroom one morning to find a girl there crying. She is not wearing the same uniform as you are! Is she from another school? Just when you are puzzling over this, the girl simply disappears! If that doesn’t surprise you then read on. “The Haunted School” tells the tale of a school girl who finds a ghost in her class. Her first reaction of course, is to yell, “Ghost! Ghost!” But as the story progresses you find that there is a problem to be solved. And it takes courage to be able to fight against something bad that is happening under your nose.
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Sometimes it is not an apparition that haunts you. Sometimes it is just a spirit or a “thing”. “The Tennis Coach” is about a boy who attends a tennis camp and finds he is a natural at tennis. But there is one problem! His coach dislikes him. When he tells this to his grandmother who is very ill, she says she too has an evil coach. Together, they are able to fight their coaches. Will they succeed? How will they fight the evil coaches in their lives?
“The Ghost in the Tower” battles emotions that can have an evil force. Priya and her parents have moved to Madras from Nagpur. Priya has to come to terms with a new place, a lack of friends and to top it all her parents’ constant bickering. She finds an escape in the shade of the tower, that was the water tank. She gets to make a few friends and they go exploring the tower. There is a dark, angry force inside that forces them out, that makes them say and do things they had no intention of doing. Will they win over the forces of evil?
Nandini Nayar's writing is simple and easy to follow. Her descriptions are vivid and bring to mind the images of the scenes she writes about. Be it the troubled child, like Priya running away from her warring parents or a little boy who is troubled by the partiality shown by his tennis coach. She brings out the difficulties a child could face.
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The Haunted School and Other Stories by Nandini Nayar, DC Books Mango, Rs. 95