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Sunday 3 August 2014

Rooftoppers

Title: Rooftoppers
Author: Katherine Rundell
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: March 2013

Rooftoppers won the 2014 Waterstones’ Children’s Book Prize and Blue Peter Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and UKLA Children’s Book Award. It is a beautiful story, an odd and lyrical fairy tale about a rescued orphan and written in dreamy prose. 

Having been rescued from her cello case floating in the ocean, Sophie builds a wonderful kinship with her eccentric guardian Charles, but is still haunted by memories of her mother – and Sophie is sure she can remember her, despite being a baby. When circumstances threaten their happy life in England of writing notes for each other on the walls, dusting around cobwebs and reading Shakespeare on the roof, Sophie and Charles set out for Paris to look for Sophie’s mother, having discovered the address of a cellist maker engraved into the case. But Sophie also befriends another group of orphaned children in Paris – the rooftoppers, who live above the city on the rooftops and in the trees – and specifically Matteo, who teaches Sophie (among other things) how to cook a pigeon and walk across a tightrope.

More than anything, this book is an ode to the “almost impossible” (and, as Sophie would say, “Never ignore a possible”). Everything is surreal and far-fetched, but that is the point, and the final pages are at once satisfying and open-ended. The crux of the story is Sophie’s need to grow in herself, and to find her mother – so (for me) we don’t need to know what happens to certain characters afterwards, whether or not certain individuals ever receive justice for misdeeds. The nature of the narrative reassures us that everything will somehow be well once the book is closed, because the power of the individual and a little imagination is asserted in Rooftoppers so powerfully.

Taken as a magical, brief interlude of a life, Rooftoppers is a stunning and beautiful novel for anyone who believes in chasing dreams.

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