Anne Michaels (text), Emma Block (illus). The Adventures of Miss Petitfour. Bloomsbury, 18 Nov 2015, 144pp., $19.99 (hbk.), ISBN 9781408868041
Canadian writer Anne Michaels is best known as the author of award-winning poetry and fiction for adults. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, a collection of five short stories, is her first foray into children’s fiction.
The publisher, Bloomsbury, has taken great care in the presentation of this book. Emma Bloom’s illustrative style perfectly matches the quirky Miss Petitfour: it is delicate, colourful, whimsical and a little bit flighty. The wraparound hardcover illustration introduces the book’s main characters—it depicts sixteen cats attached in single file to a skyward-drifting Miss Petitfour. The endpapers are filled with mouth-watering pictures of cakes and tarts. (Miss Petitfour is very fond of flying and she is particularly partial to afternoon tea.)
Michaels’ five stories are gently paced. The ‘adventures’ of Miss Petitfour are not the kind of action-packed tales you find in, for instance, Lian Tanner’s Ice Breaker series or A. L. Tait’s Mapmaker Chronicles. Rather, Miss Petitfour’s adventures are ‘just the right size’ to fit into ‘a single, magical day’. Her expeditions centre on her household of cats, her local village and her dawning affection for the charming Mr Coneybeare of Coneybeare’s Confetti factory.
Michaels weaves definitions of potentially unfamiliar words into her text—words like ‘propitious’, ‘eccentricity’ and ‘festooning’. She also uses her collection of tales to reveal the way in which stories work. She includes little asides to the reader: ‘Sometimes stories will have three special words right in the middle of them … These three little words “THEN ONE DAY”, open a story like a tiny key’. She shows how narratives use digressions and coincidences, and words that ‘save the day’ (like ‘fortunately’) or keep a story from ‘spilling out too quickly’ (like ‘meanwhile’ and ‘by the way’).
This is a lovely book to handle. It just needs a satiny book ribbon to complete its aesthetic—I’m sure Miss Petitfour would approve.
For ages 7+
Reviewed by Tessa Wooldridge
