Just finished Kiranmala and the Chaos Curse

Now, normally I think blurbs along the lines of "X meets Y" or "for fans of W" are at best silly and at worst bizarre. 95% of the books compared breathlessly to Harry Potter aren't anything like Harry Potter at all, and as for the rest, I sometimes look at those book mashups and wonder if there isn't some sort of competition to pair the most unlikely books, both of which are only tangentially similar to the advertised book anyway - "For people who loved Pat the Bunny and Fahrenheit 451!" There's an audience for that book, but god if I know who it is.

The blurb for this series tells us it's "a world packed with action and adventure, perfect for fans of Rick Riordan and Soman Chainani", which is surprisingly apt, but at three books in I think I can say definitively - and with more justification than most of these - that this series is good for fans of A Wrinkle in Time. Indeed, I am almost certain that the author must be one of those fans.

Edit: Which is not to say anything stupid like "Indian Wrinkle in Time" or whatever. Kiranmala's story is her own, not anybody else's, and the more obvious inspiration is the one the author cites in every book - Thakurmar Jhuli. But I've never read that, and I have read Wrinkle in Time and note some similarity in themes.

The kids' schools have sent emails

Eva's school confirms that they're working on making distance learning options as rapidly as possible and that students won't be penalized for non-attendance. Ana's school is much the same, but they also include a list of local food banks.

I walked the dogs and saw a lot of kids out with their parents and... if you're going to keep your kids home from school due to fear of infection but then take them with you to the grocery store, you've accomplished approximately nothing. (Especially if your mask doesn't cover your nose wtf.) If you need groceries, and your kids are big enough to watch themselves, why not let them do that?

Unrelatedly, I do not know why anybody would pay $.10 to put two packages of toilet paper into two paper bags without handles only to carry them home under the arms, just as though they weren't bagged at all.