The King in the Window by Adam GopnikMiramax Books, Hyperion Books for Children, 2005

This book seems slow at first, dull at the very start, but then there’s a richness of detail that grabs your interest, a sense of life in Paris. And then the story properly starts. Oliver, who is eleven and an American living in Paris, finds himself at the center of a centuries-old struggle between good and evil, between windows and water and mirrors and ice. The fantastic elements of the story can seem too loosely strung together, the morals sometimes too didactic, but there’s also something satisfying about it: riddles and wordplay and an interest in language and how it’s used, what it tells us.