Singh, Vandana - Younguncle Comes to Town

This is the first of two books about Younguncle, so called by everyone who knows him, no matter what relationship, including his own parents!

Here, Younguncle comes to visit his older brother's family. Younguncle is very much kids' ideal of a favorite relative: someone who is still rather childlike himself, willing to play and have fun and get in trouble, and not too worried about fussy adult things like jobs and money and taxes and marriage. Younguncle's sister-in-law and brother of course do worry about such fussy adult things and occasionally try to get him interested in them as well, to not much success.

The book is set in that time period that's very common to a lot of the childrens' books I grew up on; recent enough to have cars and phones and modern technology but without much mention of the Internet or cell phones (if any; I read this months ago and of course don't remember). The prose is charming and effortless, and nothing too bad happens. There are stolen cows and shirts that the baby wants to eat and a ghost that might be a monkey, and although I am sure I will use the word "charming" far too many times in this review, it really is a charming book.

Fun and happy-making and, yes, incredibly charming. I hope US publishers end up publishing the second book in the series as well.