This is one of my all-time favorite books. If The Phantom Tollbooth were less esoteric and more French, this would be it. Perfect for kids, but grown-ups will love it too!

Some great quotes about coffee, champagne, irony, metaphor, French vs. American culture. To wit: "...you have been the spoon in my champagne. You have preserved my bubbles." Also: "...success is usually a feeling of mere relief, where failure is pain. Happiness, you see, lies in neither, but in sticking to a daily ritual and becoming absorbed in something useful."

I cannot say enough good things about this book. This book serendipitously found me at the library, and I'm glad it did. Though it was classified as a children's book, I don't really think that it is. It has a great story - including lots of action, lots of thought provoking comments, and interesting concepts (like multiverses!).

Oliver is an American-born 12-year-old living in Paris. After an eventful Ephiphany where he gets a golden key and a paper crown, he gets mistaken for the new King of the Window. All of a sudden, a lonely boy is put into the midst of a fight for not only this universe, but all the thousands of others that also exist. He must learn how to be kingly, lead others and how to think. He is assisted by a motley crew of window wraiths (all real people from the Grand Siecle, like Racine), Mrs Pearson who is one of the witty, and his best friend Charlie from the US.

This book is a great mix of fantasy and reality. It also contains some rather funny observations on the difference between the French and the Americans. Favorite sentence: "I'm not an idiot. I'm just American."

The King in the Window is a creative, interesting, and fun children's book. The world created by Gopnik is so complete and mesmerizing. This would be the perfect book to read with your kids!

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 wonderful part about this book is the feel of Paris and the presence of the past in the present. Racine, Molière, and Richelieu (still adjusting his mayonnaise) are here, and Versailles is really a portal to a different world. The plot is fine, but what I remember is Paris, the dinner with Mrs. Pearson, the clochards, and all the windows.

I think the first half of the book was more satisfying and that it loses itself a bit when the American startup guy enters the story. Maybe New York authors just can’t write convincing Silicon Valley stereotypes. But that is a nit on a fun story with a nice bit of depth. My son didn’t see anything wrong with it. For me, catching myself reflected in the café window isn’t quite the same anymore.

Adam Gopnik's "The King in the Window" depicts the adventures of young Oliver. Oliver's family has just finished celebrating Epiphany in France and Oliver pretends to be the king and wears a paper crown. Bored to death, Oliver stares out his window and is frightened to see a reflection of another boy in the window. To his surprise, this puzzling boy happened to be a window wraith who accidentally mistakes Oliver for being king. From there Oliver explores the world of France in an attempt to save all of the window wraiths and defeat the Master of the Mirrors. The Master of the Mirrors supposedly steals peoples' souls when they stare too long into mirrors. Oliver gets himself into quite the predicaments along the way, but his sheer will to save these creatures allows him to save the wraiths and ultimately leave the Master of the Mirrors in ashes. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.

We liked the first half of this book but then it started to become more eery than we liked so, becoming uninterested, we stopped halfway through this book.

Nothing terribly remarkable. I read the first hundred pages and then went days without thinking about it, so I just didn't finish it. I need to be drawn in if I'm going to commit to 400+ pages.

This is a quick paced fantasy, in which a young American boy, living in Paris with his parents (his dad is working as a journalist), finds himself crowned a king in an alternate universe where he is the only one who can save the world from the One with None. He is joined by his tech-y American friend, Charlie, and his ofttimes snooty neighbor friend, Neige. They join forces with the window wraiths and shadows to once and for all defeat the Master of Mirrors, who has vowed to rule the multiverses by stealing all the souls of men. The book is listed under a children's book genre, but it has some rather lofty concepts (at times I needed to re-read sections to grab hold of the seeming backwardness of it all) and is an intelligent, interesting adult read! My girls needed some explanation, but really grabbed on to the characters and sympathised with them well (probably even more so with the window wraiths!). We have thoroughly enjoyed this whimsical fantasy and enjoyed delving into the deeper meanings that can be easily drawn out of this surreal story. Great book!

A thread that connects this delightful fantasy/adventure tale of a twelve-year-old American boy in Paris to other recent reading of mine is its skeptical attitude toward all the media that distracts modern children. The book's hero, Oliver, is aided in his quest to save the world from the soul-stealers, by his friend Charlie. He visits from New York carrying a 'gizmo cupboard'--an assortment of electronic devices that Oliver's parents, and French culture, discourage. They're 'addictive.'

When Charlie wonders how Oliver manages without the cell phones, GameBoys, iPods and DVD players, Oliver shrugs. 'I read,' he says.

The idea that literacy can be more than a necessary tool for success in the modern world, that reading books offers an opportunity for deep, reflective thinking not found elsewhere, is one I keep running across. In books about the brain, in 'Fahrenheit 451,' in a lecture by Maryanne Wolf, warning flags are waved. We need to find the space for children to slow down and engage in an active and reciprocal conversation with the thoughts of others. The hyper-stimulation, isolation and passive nature of electronica are not the most helpful venue.

It is fitting that Gopnik has the soul-stealers' plan for world domination based on enslaving human consciousness through the internet. To defeat them, Oliver, the unlikely King of Window Wraiths, must think.

Other nice connections to the geography of Paris, as well as 'Alice in Wonderland.'

Any book starting with cake, especially an epiphany cake and crown, has me hooked. For a YA novel, this book covers quite a bit of territory as we learn about Paris through the eyes of young Oliver and his friends. The only flaw of the book is that it tries to cover a bit too much ground as Alice (of the looking glass) meets quantum physics in a parallel world of sprites and spirits. It does make a nice January read for anyone longing to travel.