Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell
Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
Club: $9.49

Rooftoppers

Author: Katherine Rundell

Narrator: Nicola Barber

Unabridged: 5 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/24/2013


Synopsis

“The beauty of sky, music, and the belief in ‘extraordinary things’ triumph in this whimsical and magical tale” (Publishers Weekly) about a girl in search of her past who discovers a secret rooftop world in Paris.

Everyone thinks that Sophie is an orphan. True, there were no other recorded female survivors from the shipwreck that left baby Sophie floating in the English Channel in a cello case, but Sophie remembers seeing her mother wave for help. Her guardian tells her it is almost impossible that her mother is still alive—but “almost impossible” means “still possible.” And you should never ignore a possible.

So when the Welfare Agency writes to her guardian, threatening to send Sophie to an orphanage, they takes matters into their own hands and flee to Paris to look for Sophie’s mother, starting with the only clue they have—the address of the cello maker.

Evading the French authorities, she meets Matteo and his network of rooftoppers—urchins who live in the hidden spaces above the city. Together they scour the city in a search for Sophie’s mother—but can they find her before Sophie is caught and sent back to London? Or, more importantly, before she loses hope?

Phillip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials series, calls Rooftoppers “the work of a writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination.”

About Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is the author of RooftoppersCartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf WilderThe ExplorerThe Good Thieves, and The Zebra’s Great Escape. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. In her spare time, she enjoys walking on tightropes and trespassing on the rooftops of Oxford colleges.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on November 17, 2015

4 1/2 stars. This is pretty close to five stars and I might change my mind yet. Just a beautiful, lyrical and magical book, even though there is no literal magic or fantasy elements. karen pretty much nailed it when she said this was "classic-feeling". This whimsical historical tale has something ti......more

Goodreads review by karen on July 09, 2018

just a wonderful, magical, extraordinary book. the kind of classic-feeling book you can put in the hands of a little girl and feel confident that with it, she will grow into a wonderful, magical, extraordinary creature herself. it might work on boys, too, who knows? but right now i am speaking to th......more

Goodreads review by Arah-Lynda on August 12, 2016

Take a look at that cover. It is the stuff of dreams and so is this story. It was Charles that found Sophie. On the morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel. The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the musical score of a Beethoven s......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on November 27, 2013

Rooftoppers started out brilliantly; the first chapters were full of whimsy and a sense of randomness that I completely fell in love with. The beginning of the story, which chronicles how our heroine, Sophie, is found as a baby floating in the ocean in a cello case and adopted by the kind-hearted sc......more

Goodreads review by Hilary on January 30, 2022

This story started so well, a 5 star read for the first quarter of the book, after that it really went down hill. A baby is washed up from a shipwreck in cello case and a free thinking batchelor called Charles takes her in and calls her Sophie. We loved the description of their life together and the......more