'Adèle & Simon' Review: A Seek-and-Find Game in Early Twentieth-Century Paris

Adèle & Simon. By Barbara McClintock. Frances Foster Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Adèle & Simon follows two siblings, big sister Adèle and little brother Simon, as they traverse central Paris on the long walk home from school. When they leave the schoolhouse, Simon is carrying a hat, gloves, scarf, sweater, coat, knapsack, books, crayons, and a drawing of a cat that he made at school that day. It is quite a load for a small boy to keep track of, and despite his promises not to lose anything, Simon's tendency toward distraction get the better of him at each stop on their journey.

McClintock's illustrations in Adèle & Simon provide a visual feast for the francophile, especially if you are the kind of francophile who regularly savors the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose favorite Hemingway work is A Moveable Feast, whose ideal movie night includes Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, or who rereads Liebling's Between Meals on at least an annual basis. As Adèle and Simon proceed toward home, they pass through many signature scenes of the city – the Pont-Neuf bustles with shoppers, children enjoy a puppet show in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and acrobats bring the center ring of the circus to the Place du Parvis Notre-Dame. McClintock even brings them past the house where the composer Camille Saint-Saëns was born in 1835 (Simon leaves his sweater on a bench in the courtyard).

On each page there is an opportunity for the reader to look for the article that Simon has most recently misplaced (the challenge is just right for a pre-bedtime search - it is just hard enough to be engaging, but not as fiendish as some of Waldo's hiding places). Unlike many seek-and-find books, however, the rich atmospheric character of this book merits revisiting on a regular basis. It is a staple of our family's evening-reading rotation.

McClintock clearly caters for her grown-up readership just as much as she does for her kindergarten and elementary-school audience. On the inside of the cover, she reprints a map of central Paris from the 1907 edition of Karl Baedeker's guidebook Paris and Environs on which she lays out the children's route and each stopping-point from their long journey home. An appendix section also provides helpful context on each of the scenes from the book, ranging from the sources of her inspiration ("the interior of Adèle and Simon's home was inspired by the paintings of the French painter, printmaker, and photographer Edouard Vuillard") to their historical origins ("The Jardin des Plantes was established in 1635 as a royal medicinal herb garden, and later as a school of botany.") You may even find yourself feeling the urge to pull the Blue Guide Paris down from the bookshelf to dig deeper into some of the places after you put the kids to bed.