Geraldine McCaughrean is on a very short list in my head of people who write for children as if they think children appreciate writing. She, along with writers like N.D. Wilson, Jacqueline Woodson and Barbara O'Connor are the Margaret Atwoods and Anne Tylers of children's literature.
These writers appear to have never been told that grown-up literary elements like an ambitious premise, a driven main character, a landscape that reflects or contrasts the character's story - are things that are too rich for the child reader.
Thus we have Pepper Roux, who wakes up on his fourteenth birthday knowing that this will be the day that he dies. And thus he spends most of the next 300 pages on borrowed time, looking over his shoulder for the angels who are bound to be screeching toward him, bent on carrying him off to his eternal reward. If that's not a premise worthy of Jerzy Kosinski or Jhumpa Lahiri, I don't know what is.
And the way that Pepper effortlessly slides into a variety of identities - ship's captain, journalist, horse thief, and even loving husband - requires a complicity of the reader: requires that the reader both suspend disbelief and acknowledge the transparency of the deception, leading the reader to the very adult conclusion that the individual is less important than the role he or she plays.
But then, back again, as, in each case, Pepper's desire to do good affects his performance in each role, driving the plot, providing warmth and humor, and usually driving him on to his next role, as he invariably gets into trouble by investing his adult identities with a child's good heart.
Getting a little academic up in here, aren't we? What did I do with those gummy bears? I have to hide them from the children, and sometimes that means I've hidden them from myself as well.
So. All that literature stuff aside, The Death-Defying Pepper Roux is fully as bracing and adventurous as the title might lead one to believe. Set in the south of France, the salt air in it lifts the hair and stings the eyes. Characters are as broad as a lady's behind in a Toulouse Lautrec poster, and sometimes as sad.
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