Foram Shah weaves interesting tale around eating habits in Healers

Foram Shah, in her book, 'Healers' combine the above themes in a surprising tale to highlight the importance of eating healthy.

As the author would say, this tale talks about the natural healers in our body—the veggies and the fruits—our invisible best friends.

Tee is a normal teenage girl who hates eating vegetables. Her mother is worried about her daughter’s diet like every other mother on this earth and forces her to eat healthy once in a while.

But the vegetables, the fruits, and the spices in this tale are not dead objects; instead they all talk and they have emotions and they are as alive as we are.

Something similar to Toy Story, to make you understand, only in that movie the toys were alive and here the vegetables are.

The vegetable -- the cauliflower, the lemon, the lady’s finger, etc., are all friends -- after all they live in the same container. They share their miseries about losing their relatives, they fall in love, and they are scared of getting cooked.

Once Tee’s mother cooks the vegetables and feeds them to Tee, these friends gather again inside Tee’s body and there they battle to keep Tee healthy and alive.

Tee meanwhile is obsessed with getting thin like her favourite super models and for that she resorts to crash-dieting and when that fails she tries out dieting pills without informing her family.

So when Tee is putting herself in danger, there is no one around to know about it and help her, except the vegetables and the fruits who wage a war inside her body to make her realise her mistake and force her to eat normally again.

The rest of the tale is about how the ‘healers’ act as her best friend and save her when the right time comes.

A story like this is very relevant in today’s time when teenagers are getting obsessed about their body image.

The more they see frail-looking women on television, the more distorted their perceptions become.

And in the zeal to look like these so-called super models, they harm themselves with unhealthy diets.

This extreme behaviour has been observed in teenagers for a long time and this alarming tendency is not going to go away so soon.

So what is needed to fight with this menace is creating awareness among teenagers and that is where this wonderful novel comes in.

The young people need to be taught the importance of eating healthy and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

The story has been written in such an innovative manner that it is sure to keep the readers hooked.

Books like this should be distributed in school libraries to ensure that the school children read it.

Even parents can read this story to small toddlers because the talking vegetables will entertain the young ones while educating them about the importance of healthy eating.

Kudos to the author for coming up with such an amazing concept!

(Reviewed by Priya Das)