Three thrilling adventures featuring the indomitable cousins Dinu, Minu, Polly and Ravi When Ravi comes from Bombay to stay with his three cousins for the summer holidays, little does he realize this is the beginning of a series of exciting events that will test their intelligence and luck. In the first story a string of audacious robberies occur in their usually quiet town. Who is the thief? Is it the sinister Dhondu who seems to hate the children, or is he covering up for someone else? In The Hidden Treasure the four cousins end up spending their Diwali holiday in Kaka's farm in a village. Village life is fun, especially with their broken-down ancestral mansion to explore. Gradually the children realize there is something sinister afoot. Who has been digging away in the mansion in the dead of night? Did their ancestor really bury his life's savings in their sprawling ancestral home before joining the 1857 uprising, or is it just a legend? And, if the treasure's still there, will they get to it before the crooks do? In the last novel, it's Dinu, Minu and Polly's turn to visit Bombay and spend the summer with Ravi. There they make new friends, one of whom claims to have seen the face of a bank robber. Soon after, a spate of robberies break out all over Bombay. Is it the same gang at work? Then their friend is kidnapped and the four children find themselves in the midst of a desperate chase . . . Thrilling, funny, and full of memorable characters, these three novels, first published in the 1970s, are sure to captivate a whole new generation of readers. Age group of target audience: 8+

What’s Special? • Tiny Milind seems to stand no chance against a giant who wants to eat him. But he does have a clever little trick up his sleeve in The Dwarf Who Outwitted the Giant. • Sweet little puppy Raghuram is supposed to visit the vet. But no one is prepared for the chaos he creates once he’s there in Rags Meets the Doctor. • The Defective Detectives are on the tail of an animal smuggler. But their investigation becomes a little too fishy in Defectives Detectives: A Faunal Fallacy. • Sundar goes to work for a Seth who has some very strange rules and refuses to pay his employees. Find out who wins this battle of wits in Sundar and the Seth. Also starring: A grandmother visits her grandson on a magic travelling pot in Grandma Goes Visiting. A peacock that sings?! Discover this amazing bird in The Singing Peacock. A Christmas tree comes to life, but brings more trouble than joy in The Christmas Tree. And follow a simple bag of jewellery as it goes on an epic adventure in The Bag of Jewellery.

This title presents three thrilling adventures featuring the indomitable cousins Dinu, Minu, Polly and Ravi. When Ravi comes from Bombay to stay with his three cousins for the summer holidays, little does he realize this is the beginning of a series of exciting events that will test their intelligence and luck. In the first story a string of audacious robberies occur in their usually quiet town. Who is the thief? Is it the sinister Dhondu who seems to hate the children, or is he covering up for someone else? In The Hidden Treasure, the four cousins end up spending their Diwali holiday in Kaka's farm in a village. Village life is fun, especially with their broken-down ancestral mansion to explore. Gradually, the children realize there is something sinister afoot. Who has been digging away in the mansion in the dead of night? Did their ancestor really bury his life's savings in their sprawling ancestral home before joining the 1857 uprising, or is it just a legend? And, if the treasure's still there, will they get to it before the crooks do? In the last novel, it's Dinu, Minu and Polly's turn to visit Bombay and spend the summer with Ravi. bank robber. Soon after, a spate of robberies break out all over Bombay. Is it the same gang at work? Then their friend is kidnapped and the four children find themselves in the midst of a desperate chase...

Concurrent with increasing scholarly attention toward national children’s literatures, Contemporary English-language Indian Children’s Literature explores an emerging body of work that has thus far garnered little serious critical attention. Superle critically examines the ways Indian children’s writers have represented childhood in relation to the Indian nation, Indian cultural identity, and Indian girlhood. From a framework of postcolonial and feminist theories, children’s novels published between 1988 and 2008 in India are compared with those from the United Kingdom and North America from the same period, considering the differing ideologies and the current textual constructions of childhood at play in each. Broadly, Superle contends that over the past twenty years an aspirational view of childhood has developed in this literature—a view that positions children as powerful participants in the project of enabling positive social transformation. Her main argument, formed after recognizing several overarching thematic and structural patterns in more than one hundred texts, is that the novels comprise an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda: they imagine apparently empowered child characters who perform in diverse ways in the process of successfully creating and shaping the ideal Indian nation, their own well-adjusted bicultural identities in the diaspora, and/or their own empowered girlhoods. Michelle Superle is a Professor in the department of Communications at Okanagan College. She has taught children’s literature, composition, and creative writing courses at various Canadian universities and has published articles in Papers and IRCL.

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