Rooftoppers, by Katherine Rundell

Shipwrecked in the English Channel when she was just one year old, Sophie has been looked after ever since by her kindly guardian Charles. She is sure her mother must still be alive somewhere, though, and she is adamant that she remembers her: a flash of red hair, a glimpse of worn, black trousers, cello music on the breeze. But how can she convince Charles that she’s right? Charles always tells Sophie, “Never ignore a possible”, so when she finally discovers a clue to who her mother is/was, he agrees to take her to Paris and investigate.

Rooftoppers is a timeless sort of a story, set before motorcars and mobile phones, but I’m not sure exactly when. And when Sophie and Charles reach Paris, they are stone-walled by the authorities, so it’s up to Sophie to follow the clues on her own – unless her new friend, homeless rooftopper Matteo, will help her. All she has to do is show him she can run across the roofs of the city as fast and far as he can. “It’s wilder than you think,” she says, as they run and jump, the city spread out below them, bejeweled in the twilight. As their friendship grows, they feed birds whilst standing on a homemade tightrope, and dive for coins in the river Seine, following the clues and the sound of cello music. Will they find Sophie’s mum, the mysterious Vivienne Vert?

Katherine Rundell has penned a lovely, gentle story that rolls with the undulation of the rooftops that her characters patter across. There are moments of calm and wonder, moments of terror and tension – just reading about Matteo and Sophie crossing a street between two rooftops by tightrope was enough to give me vertigo. And then there’s the moment when he dangles her from the roof of a the police headquarters so she can peer in the window of the records office, or when the cross into the territory of the gariers, who defend their part of the rooftop domain by tooth and nail. It’s equally exciting and nail-biting.

But will they have a happy ending? Will the possibility of Sophie’s mother become a reality? Plenty of people are going to stand in Sophie’s way, but she’s a determined little girl who does not take “no” for an answer. I enjoyed Rooftoppers, but have one single criticism: it ended so very abruptly! I would like to have know what happened next – what happened to Sophie’s new friends? To Charles? What did the authorities do next? Gah!

Overall, though, Rooftoppers is a charming story about never giving up no matter how hopeless a quest might seem – and about believing in yourself even when others are telling you it’s silly. It would fit particularly well, I think, for readers who enjoy Eva Ibbotson or Noel Streatfeild, or last years Waterstones Children’s Book Prize shortlisted novel, The Wolf Princess.

Thursday's Children and Listen to the Nightingale, by Rumer Godden

I grew up reading the wonderful Rumer Godden – special favourites were Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, Little Plum and The Rocking Horse Secret, but until Virago re-released them earlier in the summer, neither my mum nor I had ever come across Thursday’s Children and Listen to the Nightingale, and when they arrived in the Waterstones children’s department where I work they immediately jumped out at me with their beautiful ballerina and ballerina pump patterned covers.

I’ve always loved stories about ballet, something which I think began with the wonderful classic, Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild, another one of those books that I read time and time again, along with just about anything else by her. Thursday’s Children and Listen to the Nightingale fall perfectly into this category of charming children’s stories that just ooze childhood idylls. Exactly why I find these stories so idyllic, I don’t know, especially considering that, really, they are anything but. In both Noel Streatfeild’s books and these by Rumer Godden, life is rarely anything but easy for our protagonists – often they are very poor, living on pennies, and they have to work very hard and make a lot of sacrifices to achieve their dreams. But maybe that is the very reason that I love them: because despite difficult beginnings they always have happy endings.

Thursday’s Children is the story of Doone. Youngest of six children, he was the accidental afterthought following a much-wanted girl child and thus is often ignored or forgotten or dismissed out of hand. Doone’s big sister Crystal is, by contrast, much doted upon and so, because they don’t know what else to do with him, Doone is taken along to watch while Crystal attends her dance class. But Doone is enraptured. By the dance and by the music. He watches and he learns and soon it becomes his dream to be a dancer too. First he just has to convince his mother and his father that he deserves the same chances as Crystal…

In Listen to the Nightingale we follow Lottie. She’s grown up dancing: her mother, before she died, was a dancer and her auntie is the wardrobe mistress at the renowned Holbein Theatre, where Lottie takes her lessons. But when the teaching academy part of Holbein’s must close, Lottie must continue her education at the elite Queen’s Chase, Her Majesty’s Junior Ballet School. Lottie loves the idea of Queen’s Chase, but it’ll mean giving away her beloved puppy, Prince. What will happen to Prince, and what will happen to Lottie as she enters this new world?

Although written about ten years apart, I read these two books one after the other, and it was interesting to note that there are minor crossovers between the two – principally Queen’s Chase and it’s coterie of staff (Doone also attends Queen’s Chase) – which was quite nice, although one character’s role, Ennis Glynn, didn’t quite match up between the two books. And although they were written nearly fifty and sixty years after Noel Streatfeild wrote Ballet Shoes, they certainly have a similar feel – timeless. I honestly couldn’t say what decade either Thursday’s Children or Listen to the Nightingale were intended to be set in, the only allusions to modernity being mention of a television set in Listen to the Nightingale, and the car that Doone’s family owns in Thursday’s Children. Because these children have much greater interests than watching telly and playing video games, and their families automatically travel by bus or underground to save money, that modern life rarely gets a glimpse outside the world of dance and the themes of understanding who you are and your place in the world, and fighting for what you believe in.

Perhaps I love these books because they are a sort of wish fulfillment for me, perhaps because they conjure a world in which everything seems simple (even when it’s not), perhaps because they are just lovely stories. Either way, it makes me want to own every single Noel Streatfeild book ever written and every single Rumer Godden book ever written. And, either way, I suspect I shall still be reading them even when I am 83.

Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson is a wonder, and her books never fail to transport me into her world. For a long time I have attempted to put my finger on exactly what it is that makes them so enchanting, and I think reading Journey to the River Sea has finally enabled me to do so.

Although mostly written within the last three decades, all of her books - or those  I’ve read so far - are set at the turn of the twentieth century, or during the second world war period. They are traditional, everything is always terribly proper, and there is always an element of having fallen on hard times. Think Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, or White Boots - books I have adored since I was a child and could read over and over again. Yet, the characters within her books break out of the boundaries she sets for them, they win out against the odds, they show themselves to be strong, determined women (despite the constraints set upon them by the times), and - perhaps most importantly - they have a happy ending and all the pieces come together.

Journey to the River Sea is no exception to this rule. It is 1910 and Maia, an orphan, is being shipped off to her only surviving relative, a man named Mr Carter, who lives deep in the Amazon. She couldn’t be more excited and spends the journey imagining the lives of her cousins, the things they get up to and the exotic pets they might have. But when she finally arrives, the reality is disastrously different to her wild imagination: the Carters are stoically British and unadventurous. Mrs Carter refuses to eat locally produced food, is obsessed with sealing her house off from creepy crawlies, and won’t let the children play outside; Mr Carter is oblivious and uncaring of anything other than his glass eye collection; the twin girls are rude, ignorant and unfriendly. They only agreed to take Maia in because of the money she brings with her - something which is much needed thanks to Mr Carter’s complete lack of business sense. The only brightness in Maia’s new life is the governess, Miss Minton, who quietly pulls the wool down over the Carter’s eyes, giving Maia a little touch of freedom.

This is the perfect book for any young girl, especially one with a sense for adventure. Despite the restrictions the Carters place on her, Maia takes the bit of freedom Miss Minton provides, stretches it out, and makes it her own. As with any Ibbotson character, Maia is instilled with kindness and friendliness, always thinking of and trying to help others, whilst simultaneously creating an adventure of her own. Having made friends with two boys who are as different to each other as two peas in a pod, it falls to her to extricate them from their troubles, which she does with aplomb, while also, of course, solving her own. Adventure is inevitable.

Ibbotson’s own self is reflected in many of the books she writes, as the same themes crop up again and again - themes reminiscent of her own childhood as a Jewish refugee in war era Britain. As recently written in a Daily Telegraph article (Before JK Rowling, there was Eva Ibbotson), her son says, “Ma’s entire work was about her childhood – always on the run, never with a mother and father in the same house. It was more than that she wanted to write happy stories; she couldn’t do anything else.” I can't recommend her enough.