Mirette on the High Wire by Emily Arnold McCully

She thought this was amazing and gave it 5 stars.

She is into body stuff like stretching and dancing and she wants to do that kind of thing. This idea of walking on a rope intrigued her and she didn’t think it was real. The niece thought this was a good story too. I do love the ending here and I love the setting. Mirette wants to be a tightrope walker too.

We find out that Bellini did all these amazing feats like walking across Niagara Falls and other things, but he started to be afraid and he can no longer walk on the wire. Bellini is sad for her as she will never be happy on the ground now. After many falls, she is able to walk on the rope. Mirette becomes obsessed and she starts to practice. Bellini comes to rent a room and Mirette finds him walking on the clothesline. Mirette helps her mother who runs a great hotel for traveling artists like circus performers and people in traveling shows. (Apr.The setting is a hotel in France a 100 years ago. This resonant tale is as pertinent for today's readers as it was in Hartwick's day, and McCully's visual depictions make it perhaps even more accessible. The double message of being too late to save a rare animal and of never really being able to own another creature will not be lost on readers. His sense of devastation surfaces unmistakably in an affecting and graceful watercolor painting of the boy's downcast face as shadows engulf him, as well as in a parting shot of him, his back to readers, as if searching the horizon one last time for his coveted pet. But by the time Tom returns, the stranger and his farivox have departed. As he dashes home to collect his savings, Tom hears the critter utter one word: ''Hurry.'' McCully captures the boy's excitement in one spread as he sails past a menacing dog in a vast expanse of cobblestone streets and picket fences, and in another vignette shows his last-ditch effort to come up with a few more coins by returning bottles to the grocer. The stranger tells Tom it is a rare farivox-and that it can talk-and the entranced lad negotiates to buy the animal for $10.

One day, Tom peers into a stranger's crate on a wagon and spies a curious creature. McCully's (Mirette on the High Wire) sensitively wrought paintings buoy this eloquent and wistful narrative, adapted from Harry Hartwick's Farewell to the Farivox, which introduces a 10-year-old boy living in Iowa in 1916 and the idea of endangered species.

Mirette on the High Wire by Emily Arnold McCully