What is more important to you when you read a book: characterisation or a sense of place?
Published by Faber
Paperback: £7.99
Ebook: £5.99
ISBN: 9780571346851
Pages: 274
Author contact details:
Twitter: @EagleJudith
#ThePearAffair
#PearAffair
Cover illustrated by:
Kim Geyer
Twitter: @kim_geyer
Instagram: kimgeyer63
Publisher contact details:
https://www.faber.co.uk/
Twitter: @FaberBooks
Instagram: faberbooks
Under 100 characters
summary:
Nell hunts through the beautifully evocative Paris underground and overground for her missing friend, Pear.
The first line:
You would think, thought Nell as she aimed a kick at one of the marble cats that sat wither side of the front door, if you named your daughter after your favourite handbag, you would cherish her as much, if not more, than you cherished the bag..
The key characters:
- Penelope ‘Nell’ Magnificent
- Melinda and Gerald Magnificent (Nell’s parents)
- Perrine ‘Pear’ Chaumet (Nell’s au pair)
- Xavier (Nell’s new best friend)
- Paul and Paulette (Twins and Xavier’s friends)
- Soutine Ben Amor (Xavier’s friend and his parents own Chez Ben Amor petit patisserie)
- Michel (Xavier’s Granddad)
- Coco Swann (an actress)
- Neige (Xavier’s cousin who works in Crown Couture)
- Collette (Journalist) and Emil (her brother)
- The Mayor
- Cigarette holder and Lorgnette (Work for the Mayor)
What do you need to know?
The book covers the story of a twelve year old girl called Penelope Magnificent, who hates her parents (for good reason, as she is second in line to her mother’s beloved bag in the family), but loves her au pair, Perrine. Too soon, the pair are separated, as Nell goes to boarding school and Pear goes back home to Paris, and all contact dries up. Why? Nell is determined to find out.
As luck will have it, six months after the last letter, the Magnificents need to go to Paris for business and Nell jumps at the chance to join them. When the Magnificents then decide to go on to Venice, Nell tricks them and manages to stay behind in Paris, becoming a bell-boy with her new found friend, Xavier. She continues the hunt for Pear, while exploring Paris’ lost underground city. Soon she has to battle the city’s mayor, strange shaped ladies, ‘The Thing’ and, ultimately, her family.
My review:
With Nell as a classic unloved child, you, the reader, do connect with her quite quickly and feel sorry for her situation. There are some lovely moments of character description, like, ‘Her hand, which she had raised in greeting, froze’, which reminded me a lot of, ‘The boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ prose and a teacher stalwart of English lessons in Key Stage 2 – with the Learning objective of: ‘show don’t tell’! Nell is a very likeable character – she has her weaknesses (the scene were she is scared of the dark goes on too long for my liking), but shows great strength and determination in her situation, and this is a constant theme throughout the story. And, her parents are equally disgusting and horrible! Perhaps, this character trait could have been exponentially greater: they could have been even more evil.
As you can see in the character list, there are quite a few characters which drop in and out of the story at various points with the plot twist, which can becoming quite confusing, especially for younger readers. However, I do like how the plot twists and turns and some character come back into the story given certain moments a great twist; for example, you meet the two strange ladies near the beginning of the story, but they don’t really come back into it until the dramatic scenes at the end of the story! With the twists and turns you really do start to ache with Nell for the return of her beloved Pear.
I did find it hard to get back into the book once I had stopped for a while: it didn’t seem to really hold me the whole way through: perhaps the pace is too slow or the plot too complex, I’m not sure. However, having read through the story again to help me write my review, and reflecting on it, I did enjoy the book and would be interested to read it again, especially to my class to see what their thoughts are!
I really admire the amount of research that must have gone into writing the book – there is so much detail about French food, and the city of Paris itself. You really do start to get to know it, purely from the description and enter the world of Nell.
With the world in its current crisis, the plot of a ‘Thing’ infecting bread and pastries is perhaps a little too terrifying for some. Overall, the tale is a great mystery story, with wonderful characters and great settings.
How could it be used in school?
CORE SUBJECTS
ENGLISH:
Nell’s mum loves her bag more than Nell and thus describes it with such wonderful language. It would be great to see if children could do the same thing with an inanimate object that they love, focusing on expanded noun phrases and figurative language. I could see this making a great display – ‘Our one true love’.
Nell tries to keep in contact with her beloved Pear, and it would a great exercise in understanding a character if the children wrote one of her letters to Pear. You would need to go through and hot seat Nell and Pear to see what emotions and feelings they might be going to express in their letters beforehand. As an extra challenge, could they write a letter back to Nell as if they were Pear?
MATHEMATICS:
Albert Einstein was quite prolific throughout this period in history (receiving the Noble Prize in 1921), and even though many of his ideas are not on the National Curriculum, Year 5 and 6 are introduced to algebra, which could lead you to a discussion about E = MC².
SCIENCE:
One of the Year 5 topics is the Solar System and in the 1920s some great moments in discoveries were made at that time, for example Edwin Hubble discovery of other galaxies beyond our own.
FOUNDATION SUBJECTS
ART AND DESIGN:
Pear works at the Crown Couture fashion house – children could research French fashion at the time and have a go at designing and making clothes of a similar style. As I mention below in the history section, this was also the time of the Art Deco style, which would be wonderful to try and emulate in any medium and would link nicely to many other topics that you might be studying in your school.
DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY:
There is a lot of food mentioned in the book, as the author has a personal interest in the subject! It would be really exciting for the children to have a go at making one of the items mentioned, if you have the necessary equipment in your school. On page 14, Nell describes, and eats, a triple-decker sandwich! This would be fun to design and then make!
LANGUAGES:
There are quite a few examples of the French language used in the book, especially French food, as the story is set in Paris, and if children learnt some of these words and phrases before hand this would bring the story alive.
GEOGRAPHY:
There is a great deal of information about Paris throughout the story. I would enjoy looking through old maps of Paris with the children and then seeing if you could use the information in the story to craft their own maps. I wonder if you could construct an underground map as well, as Nell and her gang spend a lot of time using the tunnels under Paris. The National Curriculum asks children to describe similarities and differences between where they are and a region in a European country.
HISTORY:
The story is set in the 1920s and many things come up which modern children will not be familiar with, for example, the use of Bell Boys in hotels. Diving into the 1920s before or during reading the book would be useful and therefore creating a fact-file of information about that era in England and in Paris would help children to understand the world of the Pear Affair. A 1920s dressing-up day would be amazing! You could play jazz music, dance the Charleston, play some baseball in honour of Babe Ruth starting his career, drink hot chocolate like Nell, watch the first Walt Disney film or look at making some Art Deco items. It is an era which had many many signatures.
If you liked this, you might like to try reading:
- Katherine Rundell
- Struan Murray
- Vashti Hardy
Where I received the book:
Toppsta
Kinkajousreadtoo 
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