A Son of the Rock

Dolphin, 2000, 121 p.

After her father died in an accident Roshana Kemal’s family – mother and younger brother Jino – lives in a caravan in the grounds of the factory where her mother works. At night Roshana has strange dreams involving The Shadowman and a jackal named Shivalu.

All too soon, in Roshana’s eyes, her mother remarries; to a plump businessman called Rajah, making good in the India of the twenty-first century. Even though the family is now much more comfortably off – all Rajah’s business friends show signs of enjoying life – Roshana resents the disruption to her life and the betrayal of her father it represents.

Her friend at school, Jeevamani Anjumbandare, frequently regales Roshana with tales of her sister Smita’s latest boyfriends. This seemingly inconsequential detail has plot ramifications.

There is a slight disconnect between the resolute realism of the depiction of Roshana’s everyday existence and interactions with her friends and the undercurrent of menace in her dreams, aspects of which can pop into her daily life. Menace appears soon enough, though, when Jino is abducted from outside a shop into which Roshana had gone to make a purchase.

Partly it is her dreams which lead Roshana to the discovery of where Jino has been taken.

True to its YA milieu the jeopardy in Spiritfeather is not over the top. A solid, straightforward read through which Greenland’s professionalism as a writer shines.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccough (it isn’t a cough; ‘hiccup’,) “in Roshana’ picture” (Roshana’s picture,) Anjumbandane (Anjumbandare.)