Rooftoppers

Product Information

He spent a day standing, bewildered, in the middle of Bond Street, and came back with a parcel of boys' shirts.

Your KS2 class will work on identifying speech in dialogue between Matteo, Anastasia and Sophie within chapter 27 of the Rooftoppers book. She wears homemade, brightly coloured trousers, and lives on chips, fish in tins, cheese and, occasionally, whisky. She took the name 'George Green' and disguised herself as a man so that she could play in a ship’s orchestra. It’s a mystery that drives the story, but the characters of the determined Sophie and bookish Charles are easy to love, which really makes the story as good as it is. And yet, now I know the author practices what she preaches, I realize that this is only one more layer of the meticulous detail with which she anchors her fantasy to reality.After a ship sinks in the English Channel, bookish bachelor Charles Maxim finds the last survivor: a 1-year-old girl floating in a cello case.

My main complaint is that the ending was rather abrupt and didn't exactly fit the flow of the story.The start of the story was wonderful but the rest was a 2 star read, it's a long book and the end part became a chore.

Found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel after a shipwreck on her first birthday, by eccentric young scholar Charles, Sophie seems to be marked out for an unconventional existence.When he saves a one year-old child from a sinking cruise ship, Charles decides he wants to keep her and gives her the name Sophie. True, there were no other recorded female survivors from the shipwreck which left baby Sophie floating in the English Channel in a cello case, but Sophie remembers seeing her mother wave for help. Parents need to know that Rooftoppers is a captivating adventure set in turn-of-the-20th-century London and Paris that includes intense violence among children -- one child recounts a battle in which he lost a fingertip and a rival lost an arm, and two groups of kids face off in a vicious fight. However, once the book became plot driven, with Sophie and Charles going on a journey to find her mother, it lost its magic for me.

In the Victorian period, women wouldn’t have been allowed to work as musicians, so Sophie’s mother must have disguised herself as a man so that she could work. As the lady from the National Childcare Agency will often point out, Charles has little idea of how to bring up a female infant. All they can afford is a cheap hotel, where Sophie has an attic room with a skylight, and once again she climbs up to practice on the roof. I wouldn’t put this at the top of the list as far as books I recommend, but I definitely think it’s worth reading.

I hope that she shares her vision in future novels, and perhaps considers using her sense of whimsy in tales for older readers. a highly improbable traverse on a tightrope between buildings, without any training, described as 'a safer option'. It kinda reminded me of "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Fluke since both books have a very similar feel. Never have we read a story and based our vocabulary exercise on one chapter, let alone the first chapter.