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E. L. Konigsburg
Having enjoyed her similarly long titled other first work I was excited to read this. I love the premise, a girl decides to run away from home and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She chooses her brother Jamie to go with her, firstly because she thinks he is rich and secondly because he sometimes makes her laugh. They are a wonderful pair and very different. Claudia is in love with elegance, comfort and planning and wants to transform her boring life. Jamie is cheeky, quickwitted, careful with money and in search of adventure. A key point of difference is when they argue about whether to follow the plan to stay in the museum as Jamie is quite disappointed they are not going to live in the woods. I think most children could see bits of themselves in both of the runaways and would wonder how they would cope living in a museum.
A mystery is ongoing in the background as the story is narrated by Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler in a letter to her lawyer Saxonberg leaving the reader to wonder how she will enter the story. The story explores lots of interesting ideas but one of its main joys as a story is going along with the children as they manage to live in the museum without discovery even managing to wash their clother and have baths. It feeds right into a human preoccupation with having adventures in ordinary places. If you lived near New York it would be great to explore the museum while reading the book.
The balance between the two children is maintained as Claudia is older and has the plan but Jamie has control over the money as most of it is his. This means that things don't just disolve into arguments at all times, although they often disagree.
Lots of the book is about what it would take for running away to have been a success. This leads to the children throwing themselves into the mystery of whether a sculpture the museum has acquired is a Michelangelo. This gives them a purpose that distracts them from the fact they have run away, although having left is something they worry remarkably little about. I really like the picture of them (left) trying to learn all there is to know about Michelangelo in an hour, characteristically ambitious from Claudia who also wants to use their time in the museum to learn everything about everything (something that delightfully leads to them following around school tours). It asks lots of questions of the reader about how you break out and challange your routine existance, something Claudia worries about a lot. It is lots of fun to read and takes place in an imagined existance quite different from many children's books and could open up new vistas for imagination. I liked the illustrations, also by E.L. Konigsburg, a lot (although Jamie often looks rather truculent in them which is not how I imagine him).
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