A Nest for Celeste

Henry Cole's A Nest for Celeste is a gentle historical story for 8 year olds, told from down among the floorboards.

What happens

Celeste makes baskets. Beautiful ones, woven from dried grass and tight enough to hold honey. She is a mouse. She lives under the dining room floor of a big old house and she does her foraging at night.

Two rats share her nook. Illianna and Trixie bully her, eat her stores and send her upstairs for better.

Then the cat gets one of them. And once the cat knows where Celeste's hole is, it simply sits in front of it and waits.

So Celeste climbs. Up the banister, higher than she has ever been, into a part of the house she has never seen. She finds a small room with a boot lying under the cot, and she nests down at the toe end of it.

The room belongs to Joseph. He is the young assistant to a man called Mr Audubon, who has come to paint the portrait of every bird in North America.

That is where the story really starts. A lonely boy a long way from Cincinnati and a mouse with nowhere left to go.

Reading it is slow and close and full of small things. The smell of candle wax and a cold, cleared table. Celeste working out a new basket design with a side pocket and a fold-over flap. Your reader stays down at mouse height for most of it, which is lovely.

There is a great deal of dead bird in this book, though, and that is worth saying plainly. Audubon shoots his specimens and pins them out to paint them. A dozen birds come out of the river at once, limp and drooping. A captured woodpecker will not eat and stops trying, and when Joseph argues about it he is told to fetch the pins.

Celeste also watches the cat kill one of the rats quite early on. Later Joseph is shot in the head by accident on a turkey hunt (he calls out for help straight afterwards, so you can tell your reader at once that he lives).

If your child cannot bear anything happening to an animal, this one will hurt. If they can, the sadness is the point of it, and Cole never looks away from what those beautiful paintings cost.

What to read next

For another small animal who does not fit where he has been put, Henry Cole also wrote Brambleheart. Twig is a chipmunk who is hopeless at every craft the Hill tries to teach him, so he goes off to find out what he is actually for.