Ms and Mx indifferent. For older kids. Longer story, outlandish characters and themes.

Eloise of Park Plaza fame heads to Paris. Fun and games and many phrases in French create a slapstick story sure to please kids interested in different cultures. ( )

In this tale, Eloise and Nanny are off to Paris, France to meet her mother. She has a fun time exploring Paris and all the landmarks that the city has to offer, but eventually longs for home.

Eloise has a lot of energy and Thompson's writing shows that, though I'm not too crazy about the way it's written. There is a lack of punctuation at times, which I can understand since Eloise is an excited child, but reading a paragraph of her breathless ranting can be exhausting. The text also gives little lessons in French for younger readers and I did like that. 72 pages is a lot for a children's book, though, and I'm not sure how well this would hold a kid's attention. I got bored about halfway through. The words are pretty small as well. I appreciate the effort Thompson put into writing like a child, but since this was written in the '50s I wonder how well it would do with a kid today. ( )

Eloise is always a delight to read, and in this adventure, she and Nanny travel to Paris. They have a rawther splendid time doing all things French, and Eloise stirs up trouble only she could. Ultimately, Eloise misses the Plaza and is so happy to return after visiting places like the Louvre, Versailles, and other iconic Parisian landmarks. Though written in the 1950s, I would personally consider this book realistic fiction, with only a few exceptions. The biggest exception was in regard to one illustration of Nanny and Eloise in a restaurant. Nanny was smoking, and that is something you would never find in a children's book today, but none of the events were otherworldly, and the book didn't dat itself too badly. I would probably never use this for educational purposes, as Eloise has an extremely unique way of speaking and sharing her ideas, which would be very hard to explain to young readers. However, this would be a really fun book for a read aloud, given enough time as the book is quite long. It would be especially fun if you had been studying France to give a child's perspective of going on a trip there.
Media: pencil or ink. ( )

Eloise and her Nanny get a telegram from Eloise's mother to join her Paris. Just like that, the well-known resident of the Plaza Hotel in New York packs her bags to head to France for a whirlwind adventure, making her unique mark at some of that capital city's most famous landmarks.

Eloise is one of those classic children's characters that for some reason I had never read as a child myself. Before a babysitting outing the other day, I happened to see this on the shelf at my local library so I figured I'd give it a try. After reading it, I had very mixed feelings about this particular title. On the one hand, it was a lot of fun to read - Eloise's frantic pace gave a lot of energy to the story, the simple drawings with a limited color palette are great for their details, the text allows for some bilingual education, there's a good amount of humor sprinkled throughout the book, and the subject matter was excellent for a Francophile like me, with so many references to Paris's cultural highlights.

On the other hand, it actually doesn't seem like that child-friendly of a book. For starters, this book clocks in 72 pages, compared to the usual picture book standard of 32 pages. The lack of punctuation (particularly quotation marks), the run-on sentences, and sometimes ambiguous narration make it a difficult book for a young child to read on his or her own as a beginner reader. But the book's length precludes it from being an easy read-aloud; meanwhile, the lack of chapters don't leave for any logical stopping off place. Some of the humor is probably over kids' heads and perhaps that's good - for instance, after getting her immunization shots for travel, Eloise says: "Then you have to have your head bandaged with cold compresses and hit Dr. Hadley with the flyswatter and clink clank pick up that phone and call Room Service to send up four peach melba and three straight Johnny Walker Black without ice and charge it please merci beaucoup". It's hard to image a sentence like that making it into a modern children's literature book! Eloise's frequent bad behavior and her absentee parents also make this book less than ideal for setting any kind of good example.

Still, I can't deny that, like I said earlier, the book is a lot of fun. It seems like something that is ultimately best shared as a read aloud to help distinguish the dialogue versus the narration, and also to parse through the story with youngsters to help them understand the cultural references and humor as well as to point out when Eloise is not acting on her best behavior. ( )