Rooftoppers

Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers is an adventure for 9 year olds about a girl who refuses to believe her mother drowned.

What happens

It starts with a shipwreck. A baby is pulled out of the English Channel, adrift inside a cello case, wrapped up warm in the pages of a Beethoven symphony. The man who lifts her into the rescue boat is a scholar called Charles Maxim, and he decides on the spot that he is keeping her. He gives her a birthday, a name and a carriage ride home, talking to her the whole way as though she were a guest at a tea party.

Charles might be the best thing in the book. He speaks English to people, French to cats and Latin to the birds. He lets Sophie eat her tea off the cover of A Midsummer Night's Dream and sleep on top of the wardrobe, and then he sleeps on the floor underneath her, just in case. When he walks into a lamppost he apologises and checks the lamppost is all right.

Sophie grows up climbing. Trees first, then the roof, where she plays her cello among the pigeons and nobody can reach her.

And all the way through she keeps saying the same thing. Her mother is alive. Everybody tells her she's wrong. Charles was on that ship and says the musicians were all men. Miss Eliot from the childcare agency puts it far less gently than that.

Then a letter turns up on Sophie's twelfth birthday. A committee has decided a girl her age can't be raised by a man who isn't related to her. Somebody will arrive on Wednesday the fifth of June to take her to an orphanage.

Two things are worth saying before you pass this one over. The book opens on a ship going down, with passengers screaming while the violins keep playing. It's short and it's very vivid. And a great deal of the story is grown-ups telling a child her mother is dead while she insists she is not. If your reader has lost someone, or has started worrying about losing you, that's a lot to hold. For a child who can take it, what they get is a girl who won't accept one single thing she's told, and a grown-up who backs her anyway.

The writing is the other reason. Charles's voice is described as what moonlight might sound like if it could talk. Sophie's hair is the colour of lightning. Your reader may well come away wanting to write things down.

What to read next

Feo in The Wolf Wilder is cut from much the same cloth, and she's in the library too. She lives in a Russian forest teaching tame wolves how to be wild again, and her trouble also turns up at the front door wearing a uniform.