As a library based organisation committed to reading, our Collection Development approach demands a careful and thoughtful review mechanism. Indian publishing for children ( in English) appears to us to be growing faster than we can keep pace and so we have been reading furiously and discussing books thoroughly for almost two decades now. 

As our team grows, our reading grows. As our readers grow, our curation and selection grows. As our needs grow our need for more critical reflection and inclusion of reader response grows. 

From October, 2025, we began a scholarship program at Bookworm to carefully review books published in the year for middle years. From amongst a pile of twenty + selected books, the team has read, reviewed, discussed and written 10 reviews that we present here. 

We hope this helps other librarians and library educators select material for their own collections and we also hope it ignites ways to understand texts from both the knowledgeable adult point of view and the reader response. 

Welcome to Bookworm’s Quarterly Book Review for middle years.