Adèle & Simon

My children ages 5 and 6 adored this book. The illustrations are beautiful, the story is charming, and the book is very engaging. My boys loved searching each page for the items Simon kept losing throughout the story. Clever. Lovely. Quality book.

Make sure to allow plenty of time for reading this book - the pictures are so detailed, you and your kids could look at it for a long time. The story is simple, but nicely written and a pleasure to read aloud. My six-year-old daughter loves searching the illustrations for the items that Simon keeps dropping. She also likes the other details, like Madeline and her friends walking through the park. My three-year-old son is less interested, as there are not enough trains for his taste.

Imagine letting your kids wander city streets alone for a few hours after school. No cell phones, no nannies, no idea where they are or what they're up to. Not in a hundred years, right? Yup. McClintock takes us back a full century to Paris at its fullest glory, when the Impressionists were still alive and the colorful streets teemed with activity (instead of traffic) and cheerful kids could meander for hours. How different from our own anxious, overscheduled age! Big sister Adele picks up a smiley Simon after school, who's schlepping a full rucksack and the usual cold-weather garb. Since this is pre-Ritalin, he's allowed to be what we once called a typical boy: irrepressible, funny, smart and a complete ruffian. He's off in a dozen directions at once, losing a scarf here or crayons there as he drags his sister through a leafy, sepia-drenched Paris and one gorgeous full-bleed spread after another. We're launched on a "Where's Waldo"-style hunt for all those missing items, which get stuck in trees or a baby carriage or who knows where. I was quite pleased with myself for finding most of them, even as I empathized with Adele's mounting exasperation. McClintock used pen and ink to recreate this wondrous city at its most vital, then filled it in with watercolors. Each spread looks like a period print or vintage postcard, even down to the choice in typeface. Hers is an idealized fin de siecle Paris, where parades just happen by and acrobats pop up and Edgar Degas is available to hunt for those missing crayons (end notes fill in some must-know facts). I've made three trips to Paris and can tell you the Jardins du Luxembourg hasn't changed a bit, and the Boulevard St. Germaine looks just so, and the Louvre and Notre Dame and the bistros and courtyards must absolutely be exactly like this. Only I never noticed two schoolchildren taking the long way home, wending their way through the crowds, misadventures in full swing. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.

I bought this book 2 weeks ago and my 3 year old son asks me to read it everyday ( sometimes 2 and 3 times). Hidden in the pages of this simple story of Adele and her little brother misplacing brother Simon, is a submersive journey back in time to Paris in the turn of the century. Hidden historical jems lie in the beautifully intricate illustrations Barbara McClintock composes. I truly discover something new each time I open the book and explore the pages and inevitably so does my son. Sometime we don't even read the story - we just go from scene to scene looking for Monkeys or Madeline or sampling an eclair. What a joy!

I'm a bit odd. There is nothing I like more in the entire world than for a picture book to make me feel stupid. I live for the feeling. And, as it happens, it doesn't occur as often as I should like it to. Enter in Barbara McClintock. The unofficial successor to Kate Greenway, Ms. McClintock's books are touch and go affairs. One moment she's penning the unaccountably beautiful, "Dahlia". Next minute she's scandalizing Beatrix Potter puritans everywhere with her re-illustration of, "A Tale of Two Bad Mice". I always want to count on Ms. McClintock, but I never know how a book is going to come off until I have it sitting smack dab in front of me. The fact that, "Adele and Simon" not only fell into the Good McClintock bin but went above and beyond the call of duty by being smart, beautiful, ludicrously well-detailed, and other terms of high praise... well it's enough to make a librarian like myself weep with joy. For pure unvarnished and unapologetic Francophilia alongside references to art, culture, and a smattering of "Where's Waldo", McClintok's newest is an enjoyable book that deserves as much love as I can heap upon it. At the turn of the twentieth century a girl named Adele picks up her little brother, Simon, from school. Simon's a pleasant kid, but he has an odd tendency to lose his things. Right from the start Adele says to him, "Simon, please try not to lose anything today". Simon replies honestly but with more than a hint of foreshadowing, "I'll try". Together, the two walk about Paris and each place they go Simon loses something new. At first it's just small things. The cat picture he made in school goes missing during a street market. His scarf goes awry in the natural history museum. As the kids continue, however, Simon's losses get bigger. His crayons are somewhere in the Louvre. His knapsack turns up missing in The Maison Cador. His sweater in The Cour de Rohan. By the time the two kids get home Simon just has the clothes on his back. However, there is soon a knock on the door and a long line of people are standing there with ALL of Simon's lost things! And that evening a happy sleepy Simon asks if Adele will pick him up again from school. She will. She always does. The actual tone of the book was definitely a familiar one. I think we've all read books in which an older impatient female sibling must look after a younger carefree male one. The best example of this might well be the Max and Ruby books by Rosemary Wells. As a person can see by the cover of this book, though, it's clear who the uptight child is and which one has the jolly devil-may-care attitude. McClintock's story is a light-hearted lovely look at the ways siblings love and annoy one another. The fact that her pictures have the tendency to pop the average reader's eyes out of their sockets is just a bonus, really. By the way, are you going to Paris anytime soon? Taking the kids? Want them to show some mild interest in where you're headed? Take this book. I'm serious.