It began with a dream—devout Aunt Mireille’s to be precise. The baby boy will be dead by his fourteenth birthday, declared St. Constance. Con sequently, instead of calling him by his given name, Paul, the boy’s family referred to him as le pauvre—poor one. On the playground—when Paul achieved the appropriate age to attend school—and with children’s language being vagrant, Pauvre transmogrified into Poivre: Pepper. Hence, on his fourteenth birthday, hoping to spare his parents and devout aunt’s sensibili ties, Pepper Roux dauntlessly departs to meet his irrevocable fate. The humor of Pepper’s madcap adventures is reminiscent of McCaughrean’s Stop the Train! (HarperCollins, 2003). Geraldine McCaughrean has been awarded the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Prize, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and the Michael L. Printz Award. lmp

Originally published by Oxford University Press Great Britain, in 2009.