TWELVE-year-old Changez’s fresh narrative voice propels the story in Shandana Minhas’s madcap adventure Survival Tips for Lunatics. Billed as a children’s book, Survival Tips will earn many a nod of appreciation and chuckle of delight from those who are long past the tween category.

On a camping trip with their parents, Changez and Timmy wake up to find themselves accidentally left behind by the rest of the party which has packed up camp and moved on. After a minor earthquake seals off all possibility of their staying on the camp site and waiting, the brothers must make their way through the wilderness of Balochistan back to their parents. “Wilderness of Balochistan” is actually incorrect: despite the many animals — mythical, prehistoric, endangered, and others — that the boys encounter, Minhas imagines Balochistan as a friendlier terrain than is generally thought; a place where the possibilities are wondrous rather than merely sinister.

The underwhelmingly-described earthquake serves mainly as a break from reality, kick-starting the adventure in which talking animals from golden eagles to a Chiltan Markhor and the Blind Indus Dolphin make it their business to transport the boys back to safety. Why they should do so is unclear, and one does not pause to ask as the brothers dodge hungry crocodiles, vicious velociraptors, a raging dragon and all manners of threatening humans. But the greatest danger that this novel contains is the pitfall of sounding a bit too inspired by Roald Dahl in places, such as when Changez tries to escape a particularly sticky situation by proclaiming to his captors: “We are indeed two dangerous little donuts with a dusting of dastardliness, two small boys with the most nefarious of nefarious designs.”

This is a minor quibble, however, given the overall strong and engaging storytelling. Changez has a charming narrative voice — cocky and yet all-too-innocent — and young readers will enjoy the wordplay and puns that are a hallmark of his style: “Night would soon fall and I did not want to be crushed under it.” In other places, this cockiness is tempered by his utter obliviousness: “Mom said the locals called [the crocodiles] vagus. I thought it was cool that there were crocodiles in Pakistan. And even cooler that locals could speak. In other places, they just came in great swarms that obscured the sky and ate all the crops.”

Changez is the typical big brother: deriding Timmy while keeping a jealous tally of all marks of favour towards him by others, projecting his fears on Timmy while gaining courage from the need to protect him, and above all, appropriating credit for everything Timmy does. As for Timmy, he is the little brother who falls asleep at the most hair-raising turns of their adventure — during an earthquake, riding atop a dinosaur, floating downstream — and takes a perverse delight in being contradictory and misnaming the many animals the boys encounter. Readers will look forward to Timmy’s hilarious and outrageous subversions that are calculated mainly to outrage Changez.

The sibling dynamics are spot on and delivered with a healthy dose of humour and affection by Minhas who is clearly mining her own life for material. The author’s biography states that she has two sons and the depiction of the brothers’ relationship is pitch perfect here. Timmy becomes the voice of all the fears that the elder Changez suppresses. This comes to a climax during this hilarious exchange between Changez and his little brother when the two are walking through a particularly dark and unsettling tunnel.

“Are you scared?”

“I’m not scared. Are you scared?”

“I just told you, I’m not scared!”

Minhas creates memorable characters in Sparrow and Bear, the two animal guides that help the brothers back to safety. Despite the fact that Bear talks more like a Native American than a native Baloch — “If I must go into the Great Dreaming to make sure that you stay in Wakefulness, I will go in peace” — he is an inspirational character and his nobility is sure to touch the hearts of young readers. The more interesting characters are those who never really make an appearance except in Changez’s commentary: the conscientious, conflicted, careless hipster parents who shield their offspring from the knowledge of animal slaughter on Bakra Eid but not from wilderness itself.

The story lends itself well to illustrations and that opportunity is not squandered. Sayan Mukherjee’s illustrations are bold, dynamic and vivid, with a level of detail that will enrapture young readers and aid the imagination. In these sketches, the Baluchitheria dinosaur comes to life and Bear, in particular, is lovingly illustrated.

And finally, a word about what makes this novel such a winner. Minhas does not appear to be encumbered by the prospect of being a ‘Pakistani’ novelist, neither exoticising her subject nor taking up issues to gain credence with her readership. The novel appears quite simply to be written for her sons, and has a forthrightness and integrity about it that frees it from the shackles of being ‘Pakistani literature in English’ to simply a rollicking ‘children’s book’. Minhas does work in some insidious political commentary with references to beefed-up school security, religious extremism and the army. The Baluchitheria dinosaurs and velociraptors, the boys are told by Bear, appeared out of the blue after “no-clear testing: It is no clear to us why humans do it so we call it no-clear testing.”

Some parents may deem the book unsuitable for their young readers because of a few thoughtless jokes and poor word choices. Sometimes, the brotherly ribbing goes a tad overboard, at other points Changez’s cynicism appears as something darker than a 12-year-old trying his hand at sounding like an adult. But there are enough sunny patches in the book to balance that out. I could not approve of my 7-year-old reading about “atomic wedgies” nor did I think he would be able to draw the line for himself when Changez off-handedly calls a parent “stupid”, although he picked up the book several times and was riveted by the illustrations. For 9 to 12 year-olds, this is a well-written, captivating adventure story that I would not hesitate to recommend.

Survival Tips for Lunatics

(CHILDREN’S FICTION)

By Shandana Minhas

Illustrated by Sayan Mukherjee

Hachette, India

ISBN 978-9350098295

184pp.