A Place for Pauline

November 1, 2022
Pauvre Pauline! The eldest of three (soon to be four) children in a lively bilingual (French/English) household, she needs a reprieve from the family chaos. Cozy setting details such as family photos and comfy, rounded forms make her home feel like a loving one in Perreten's busy paneled cartoon-style ink drawings, but Pauline longs for a place that's "just mine." She finds sanctuary in a closet under the stairs. "Here, I have my cushions, my books by the Countess of Segur, my cacti, my glass marble, and above all...silence!" Inspired by her books, she imagines fantastic adventures but grows lonesome and worries that no one realizes where she is. Instead of immediately joining her noisy family, Pauline concocts a plan to hop aboard a ship to visit her grandmother in France. Before she can stow away, however, her mother invites her to work in the garden. The flowers will bloom in the hues of the French tricolor, but it's her mother's undivided attention that truly entices Pauline to feel that she's in the right place after all. Megan Dowd Lambert

(Copyright 2022 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

July 1, 2022
A big sister finds her place. In this uncredited translation from the French, Pauline feels squished. Among her busy parents (and pregnant mother), a rambunctious little brother, and an adorably toddling little sister, she feels overburdened by responsibility but otherwise underappreciated and often lost in the shuffle. Like generations of storybook elder siblings, she decides to strike out on her own, with plans of jumping a ship and visiting her grandmother in France. But her runaway bag becomes weighted down with nostalgic nonessentials, and her mother interrupts her plans with a private gardening session. The illustrations are delightful; Pauline is especially so, with her huge, emotive eyes and crude yet deeply relatable body language. Bold lines, a generally muted palette with pops of red and green, and energetic motion are highly appealing visually. All characters are light-skinned. The structure and style--longer than a typical picture book, organized into panels but on the short side for a graphic novel--might make it hard to find its ideal audience. Middle-grade readers often want something more substantial, while a picture-book crowd will find this a challenging read-aloud given the sound effects and speech bubbles. However, there's enough humor, love, and resolution here to pull in readers of any age. Sweet, simple, and deftly executed. (Graphic novel. 6-11)

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2022
Pauvre Pauline! The eldest of three (soon to be four) children in a lively bilingual (French/English) household, she needs a reprieve from the family chaos. Cozy setting details such as family photos and comfy, rounded forms make her home feel like a loving one in Perreten's busy paneled cartoon-style ink drawings, but Pauline longs for a place that's "just mine." She finds sanctuary in a closet under the stairs. "Here, I have my cushions, my books by the Countess of Segur, my cacti, my glass marble, and above all...silence!" Inspired by her books, she imagines fantastic adventures but grows lonesome and worries that no one realizes where she is. Instead of immediately joining her noisy family, Pauline concocts a plan to hop aboard a ship to visit her grandmother in France. Before she can stow away, however, her mother invites her to work in the garden. The flowers will bloom in the hues of the French tricolor, but it's her mother's undivided attention that truly entices Pauline to feel that she's in the right place after all.

(Copyright 2022 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)