Music of the Stars and Other Love Stories
Writing love stories for young adults can be a little tricky, what with maintaining just the right quantities of mush and drama and avoiding the cloyingly lyrical approach and still trying to gently creep into the hearts of the readers. (All this while ingeniously reinventing the boy-meets-girl syndrome). But the writers featured in Music of the Stars and Other Love Stories, Scholastic India’s newest anthology, have achieved this with considerable panache and restraint. Trisha Ray uses the epistolatory form to chronicle a rather unusual love affair in ‘Messages from the Alien Invasion’, while Kenny Basumatary places his love story against the backdrop of a character’s stomach problems in the hilarious ‘When Nature Calls for Percussion’. Spec-fic writer Payal Dhar steps away from her usual genre to write a teenage romance story, as does Anil Menon.
Spanning a surprising array of genres and styles, and set in different places (from the starkly urban New York City to the campsite of a wandering puppeteer) and time periods, the stories in this collection explore love and its different quirks, moods and shades, sometimes with humour and absurdity, sometimes with wonder and curiosity, and sometimes with good old passion.
Scholastic India 