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The King in the Window Adam Gopnik 9780786838943 Books

Download As PDF : The King in the Window Adam Gopnik 9780786838943 Books

The King in the Window Adam Gopnik 9780786838943 Books

I bought this for my grandson. He was thrilled! He brought it over on Mother's Day and it never left his side. His mom tells me it was in great shape when it arrived but not it is dog-eared and the front cover has been bent back....Just as it should be. Very happy with my purchase!


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The King in the Window Adam Gopnik 9780786838943 Books Reviews

I bought this book for my kids because both my son and I so enjoyed Gopnik's book, Paris to the Moon. While I did like parts of the book, and it starts well, the plot simply becomes too convoluted and confusing for the book as a whole to succeed. Complication upon complication are added, alternative realities, the mirror maze, lost children, and on and on until it simply overwhelms the reader. If the book had been simpler and shorter it would have been much more effective. In addition, Gopnik's inspiration seems to fade at times and he repeats words in an annoying way. Oliver, the main character, is "inexorably" pulled towards a mirror on page 97, Charlie is "inexorably" sucked into an ice cube on page 192, Oliver and Neige are "inexorably" pulled along on pages 210, 215, and 221. Use a thesaurus!

Even given that, as I said, there is some enjoyment to be found. My daughter and I visited the little known (at least to most Americans) Musee Grevin a few weeks before reading the part of the book where Oliver also rushes to the same museum. Continually finding places in Paris referenced that we had visited was nice, but for life in Paris find Gopnik's earlier book and read it.
Cross Harry Potter with Alice through the Looking Glass. Add a touch of The Little Prince, and season carefully with hints of multiverse physics to balance the wonders of rhetoric and metaphor. When you're done you might have something close to Adam Gopnik's children's novel, The King in the Window. And if you're wondering if kids could ever understand the concept of rhetoric (or multiverses), try this simple explanation from an early chapter "It dressed up ordinary things in fancy paper, then let you unwrap them in your mind, like presents."

Oliver Parker is a twelve-year-old American boy living in Paris. Contrasts between America and France are very convincingly portrayed through Oliver's eyes and through comments from his parents and teachers. Life is hard. School is serious. And language arts, taught in a foreign language, give heavy devoirs (homework). But that's not Oliver's only problem. There's the fact that his father, once loving and deeply involved in his life, now seems to grow ever more distant. There's the row he had with a girl called Neige downstairs. There's the American friend who's too far away to be any help, but thanks to computers and wi-fi hotspots is near enough to talk to. And there's the strange character who looks out from a window when Oliver incautiously, and childishly, persists in wearing a paper crown after Epiphany celebrations.

This novel has all the charm and intriguing word-play of Alice, the solid world-building and modern-day outlook of Harry Potter, the foreign mystique of the Little Prince, and a wonderful combination of imagination, allegory and science. Exciting, innocent, esoterically clever and solidly down-to-earth, the result is a book that draws adults in just as surely as children, leaving the reader just slightly the wiser, pleasantly confused, and with a whole new wonderful outlook on windows and mirrors.

Disclosure A friend's grandson recommended this book and I loved it!
"The King In The Window"
by Adam Gopnik
(Miramax Books, 2005)
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I once knew a girl who grew up in Marin County and whose mother knew Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, and (so the story goes) occasionally he would babysit for them and tell bedtime stories. I imagine that being author Adam Gopnik's son would be a bit like that, having a singular creative intelligence at your beck and call, weaving stories that no one else can hear... Until, now that is this childrens fantasy book is clearly based on stories that Gopnik - an essayist for the "New Yorker" magazine - wove for his son while on a multi-year assignment in France. The hero, Oliver Parker, is a twelve-year old American boy who has spent most of his life growing up in Paris with his (cough, cough) newspaper-writer father and cheerful, athletically-inclined mom.

In a dense epic that weaves in echoes of "Peter Pan," "Alice In Wonderland" and that creepy '80s movie with David Bowie in it, "Labyrinth," Gopnik tells a tale of an alternate world of mirror and window reflections at war with each other, and a sinister force inside of mirrors that steals the souls of those who are overly vain. The soul-stealing theme is a bit intense, and genuinely creepy, and like some of the book's more complex concepts, isn't entirely translated from the adult imagination into smooth-enough prose that would be accessible to most children. Indeed, although I found many passages captivating, I was surprised at how earthen and lumpy Gopnik's prose was here... I admire him greatly as a writer and humorist, but found much of this book had a fairly mechanical feel to it - paragraphs often seemed repetitive and circular and I was surprised at how often a stylist for the New Yorker would reuse the same words and phrases in such close proximity (in one short paragraph the word "light" is repeated seven times - do they not have thesauri in France?) Also, the book could have been about a fifth shorter than it was - sometimes it got a bit too wordy.

Still, this is an imaginative and intelligent fantasy adventure, and I would recommend it for families of a certain intellectual, egghead-y bent. It's not the greatest kid's book ever, but it's certainly not the worst. Worth checking out. (Joe Sixpack, ReadThatAgain childrens book reviews)
Very creative story. The only thing I would have included in this book is a map of Paris in order to follow Oliver and his amusing wraiths.
I bought this for my grandson. He was thrilled! He brought it over on Mother's Day and it never left his side. His mom tells me it was in great shape when it arrived but not it is dog-eared and the front cover has been bent back....Just as it should be. Very happy with my purchase!