The Testament of Yves Gundron by Emily BartonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

“Imagine the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, when darkness was newly separated from light.”—thus begins Yves Gundron’s “treatise on the nature of change.” Yves lives in a village called Mandragora, a village nestled below mountains, not far from a city called Nnms. Yves and his neighbors are farmers; Yves is also an inventor, and his first invention, the harness, promises to revolutionize the lives of Mandragorans. But the harness isn’t the only change to befall this little town, where things may not be as they first seem. I love the pace of Barton’s writing, and Yves, as writer and as inventor, is a wonderful narrator.