Book #199 of 2017:
Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell
This is such a warm, cozy story of a baby found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck and the absentminded scholar who adopts her. Other characters may not understand Charles and Sophie’s unique little family, but they’re happy with one another and I just wanted to curl up inside that happiness and drowse.
When it looks like twelve-year-old Sophie will be forced to leave Charles and live in an orphanage, the two of them follow a tenuous clue about her mother’s identity to Paris, where they meet the roof-dwelling homeless children who give the book its title. This part didn’t give me as fuzzy a feeling, but it was still pleasingly reminiscent of the classic children’s novel From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (only even better, since it lacked that book’s feeling of well-off kids slumming it on a lark). All in all a very cute story, and an immediate placement on the shortlist for books I’ll read to my own children one day.
★★★★☆
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