Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell
I first found about this book when I saw a it in a window display from the bus and I added it to my To Read list straight away. However it was not until I visited the 26 Characters exhibition at The Story Museum in Oxford, and I was looking at the Where The Wild Things Are installation that I found out that Katherine Rundell was an Oxford writer, and I found out more about this book.
I am so glad I delved into this story straight away now. It’s a deliciously simple idea: that of an orphan found floating adrift in a cello case after the ship goes down, and Sophie’s lifelong quest to find her mother whom she believes in her heart is still alive.
It’s told through a refreshingly small cast of characters and its quotable at every turn for just about any eventuality. So often did I want to tweet a favourite line that I soon realised that if I did I would soon find myself plagurising the entire story!
The setting is beautiful too. It’s mostly set in Paris, but in a Paris that could just as easily be any other city with rooftops to clamber around on, for most of the story is set high above street level in a second, hidden city, that most of us forget is even there. And who hasn’t found themselves looking up, past the gaudy shopfronts and distractions down on the ground and found the higgledy-piggledy rooftops the more interesting?
From the start, you are reminded to the very end, to always pursue you dreams and never ignor the ‘possible’. And that is a very good moral to remember and live by.
