Clair-de-Lune

Clair-de-Lune was a fortuitous op shop find, because this is a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. I became Facebook friends with Cassandra Golds after meeting her once years ago, I adored The Museum of Mary Child, but Clair-de-Lune was written in 2004. Golds and I seem to have had quite similar tastes in childhood reading (ballet books, Narnia, the incomparable Nicholas Stuart Gray) and Clair-de-Lune combines the most magical elements of my favourite books into one irresistible package.

It's a fabulous story -- by which I mean, it's like a fable. Small, silent Clair-de-Lune lives in a tall old building filled with mysterious inhabitants in a city that seems quite like Paris. She lives with her grandmother in genteel poverty, just like Sylvia and her great-aunt in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, except that Clair-de-Lune's grandmother is mean, unlike Sylvia's gentle aunt. Two of the most mysterious inhabitants are the kind monk, Brother Inchmahone (yes, there is a whole monastery secreted in the building, behind a stone door) and the chatty, excitable mouse Bonaventure, whose dream it is to start a ballet school for mice. (Shades of Narnia's gallant Reepicheep!)

To say more would be to spoil the story, but suffice it to say that Clair-de-Lune, most unexpectedly, made me cry. I'm a jaded old reader these days and I can't remember the last time I cried at a book, but Clair-de-Lune did it. This book is a gorgeous treasure, old-fashioned in the best possible way.