Ganesha's Sweet Tooth

This is the Sanjay Patel picture book for the read-aloud crowd. Co-written with Emily Haynes (his frequent collaborator at Chronicle), illustrated by Patel alone, Ganesha’s Sweet Tooth takes one of the smallest tales in the Ganesha cycle — how his tusk got broken — and gives it a full picture-book treatment.

The narrative arc is just right for the age band. Ganesha, illustrated as a bouncy round elephant-boy with an enormous appetite for sweets, finds the biggest, hardest candy ever made (a “super jumbo jawbreaker laddoo”). He breaks his tooth on it. He’s miserable. Then the sage Vyasa shows up and asks Ganesha to be his scribe for an enormous story he wants to tell — a story so long that Ganesha’s broken tusk becomes the only thing strong enough to write it down. That story, of course, is the Mahabharata.

What’s quietly clever about the book is how it works as a doorway. A 4-year-old hearing it for the first time gets a satisfying tale about a boy who breaks something and turns it into something useful. A 7-year-old asks “what was the story he wrote?” and a parent now has an opening to talk about the longest poem in the world. An adult reads it and notices that Patel has done the entire Ganesha-Vyasa-Mahabharata frame in 32 pages without ever sounding like he’s teaching.

The colour palette and character design read as a direct continuation of Divine Loophole, which is the same artist’s full Ramayana. Households tend to end up with both.

A worthy first Hindu book for a young child. Pairs perfectly with reading any abridged Mahabharata aloud a few years later.