Book Review: The Dandelions Have It by Sohini Sen
2 min read
Sutanuka Ghosh Roy reviews Sohini Sen’s The Dandelions Have It (Penprints, 2025), observing how it is a ceremoniously innovative and thematically rich contribution to contemporary English literature.
- ISBN: 978-81-988004-8–0 (hardback)
- Price: Rs 2600| $ 85.
The Dandelions Have It weaves the threads of prose fiction with visual art to produce a unique ‘coffee-table illustrated literary fiction’. Sohini Sen crafts a text that is both aesthetically appealing and thought-provoking. The use of mixed-media collages is an avant-garde feature in literary fiction. The hybridization of the text and the image aligns the work with contemporary experiments in intermediality, blurring the boundaries between literary and visual arts. These visual elements do not merely illustrate but co-build meaning, offering a multifaceted reading experience. The collage technique used by Sen in the text—the juxtaposition of disparate materials—serves as a metaphor for the narrative itself: scrappy yet unified, messy yet meaningful. Its cross-generational appeal and experimental form locate it as a significant intervention in the evolving landscape of illustrated literary fiction. The Dandelions Have It is a heady concoction of philosophical inquiry, visual artistry and ecological consciousness.
Located in the serene Himalayan landscape, the ‘illustrated literary fiction’ narrates the existential journey of Quillo, a hedgehog, whose empirical growth unfolds through chance meetings with a whole badge of anthropomorphic animals. It can be dubbed a bildungsroman, which chronicles Quillo’s emotional and ethical evolution. However, Sen complicates this conventional framework through the amalgamation of magic realism, allowing the narrative to operate simultaneously on literal and symbolic planes. The manifestation of elements such as a “magic pebble” and thoughtfully eloquent animals enables a layered reading experience where realism is kneaded with allegory.
