Title: Tara Goes Aahhhhh
Publisher: Harper Collins
The UnStuck series comprises self-reading, wordless, pop-up picture books designed to initiate conversations about feelings with young readers. These books aim to assist children in recognising their emotions, locating them within their bodies, and feeling empowered with the understanding that it is possible to become unstuck from feelings of fear, anxiety, rage, and loneliness.
Author Garima Gupta says, ‘The idea for UnStuck emerged during the peak of the second wave of COVID, when I realised that adults at least have the luxury of lamenting their pain, fear, anger, and loneliness. Children, however, suffer silently. Even when a child borrows these words from adults, the process of being stuck and unblocking from such feelings can be quite baffling. With quiet cues scattered throughout the book, Tara Goes Aahhhhh is my attempt to introduce the presence, texture, and nature of fear. In the book, fear appears suddenly, overwhelms, is misunderstood, recognised, and even cared for, before it somewhat disappears. This suggests that fear is not a quiet, passive creature. It is wild; it comes and goes, scares us senseless, and prompts us to do strange things. But when it feels seen — not as an enemy but as a force that lives within us — it no longer seems impossible, but rather a funny friend with quirks, and so on.’
About the book
Tara is scared of the dark, but her friend the dinosaur is thirsty. Together they muster up the courage to get water from the kitchen when her shadow suddenly startles her. Aaaathhhhhhhh … she screams, but wait, what’s coming out of Tara? It’s pink! Is it smoke? No … Ohh, it has eyes! And it even looks like Tara! Could it be that they have stumbled upon a secret place where feelings hide?
What are feelings? Why do we have them, and what do they want from us? What will Tara do when she meets her fear for the first time?
About the author
Garima Gupta is an artist and illustrator based in New Delhi. Her illustrations have appeared in various publications, including India Today Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and others. Her illustrated books include the graphic novels When Crows Are White, written by Jerry Pinto, and Two, written by the Indo-Swedish writers’ duo Örjan Persson and Paro Anand, among several others.
