Rat

Starred review from December 7, 2009
Eberstadt (Little Money Street
) creates a powerful modern legend in which a drug dealer can be a fairy godmother and the handsome prince may turn out to be your father. Fifteen-year-old Celia Bonnet, aka Rat, lives with her mother, Vanessa, in the Pyrenees, where they survive on what they can scavenge and sell at local markets. Rat dreams of some day meeting her long-gone biological father, who got Vanessa pregnant during a one-night stand. Rat and Vanessa's tiny family grows first with Morgan, the orphaned son of Vanessa's best friend, and then with Vanessa's boyfriend, Thierry. But after Thierry sexually assaults Morgan, Rat and Morgan run away, dreaming of crossing the Channel to find Rat's biological father, Gillem. Eberstadt invokes the heroines of Charlotte Brontë and Cynthia Voigt to create Rat, who moves forward out of grim determination to protect Morgan, and though Vanessa could be less opaque, Eberstadt creates a sympathetic figure in Gillem, whose artistic crisis takes a backseat to the demands of new fatherhood. Amid the thorns and crumb trails is a portrait of a childhood lived freely, the dangers weighed against its potential for adventure.

Starred review from January 1, 2010
The travels of two intrepid youngsters become an unlikely journey to maturity in this engaging fifth novel from the London-based American author (The Furies, 2003 etc.).

In its primary narrative, we're introduced to 15-year-old Celia Bonnet, affectionately dubbed"Rat" by her beautiful, wayward mother Vanessa, with whom she lives in the French Pyrnnes near the Spanish border, where Vanessa makes a living as a brocanteur working the open markets ("She buys and sells old goods"). Bonding with a friend her age (Jrme) and a younger orphan (Morgan) adopted by the impulsive Vanessa, Rat lives an essentially outdoor, unstructured life, pumping her mom for information about the stranger who fathered her—London artist Gillem McKane, the son of famous fashion model Celia Kidd. When Vanessa's live-in lover Thierry proves himself alarmingly unworthy of her (or anyone's) affections, Rat and Morgan strike out for London. When this strongly imagined novel sticks closely to Rat's brash, stoical viewpoint, it's riveting. But when, halfway through the narrative, her experiences and perceptions are juxtaposed with those of the reintroduced Gillem, the story briefly loses conviction. Gillem's morose fatalism, which inspires his envisioning of the Iraq War in an ambitious modern Bayeux Tapestry, is never fully credible. Parallels and contrasts to Rat's busy imagination are nicely handled, but it's only when Rat and he force themselves to connect, tell their separate truths and risk both the creation and the loss of intimacy, that the book comes fully alive. When Rat realizes that Vanessa needs her more than she herself needs a father, the pieces fall beautifully, movingly into place.

A mature, intelligent and unusually perceptive study of the paradoxes of belonging to others, and being oneself—Eberstadt's best novel yet.

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February 1, 2010
Growing up with her loving single-parent mom in a rough neighborhood in the South of France, Celia names herself Rat, and when Mom adopts Algerian orphan Morgan, 15-year-old Rat acts as his fierce older sister, protecting him first against racism in the community (It stinks being Arab in France) and then against sexual abuse at home, when Mom refuses to believe her sleazy boyfriend is abusing Morgan. Always haunted by the mystery of the father she has never met, Rat runs away with Morgan to London to find her dadand herself. Eberstadts contemporary take on the elemental identity quest is rich, wry, and heartbreaking, complete with e-mails, security cameras, cell phones, and globish talk. Whether it is the immediate drama of Rats loss of innocence (her blithe assumption that other people were basically well-intentioned) or her sometimes painful independence from the mother she loves (from worship to apartness to wary but still infintely tender), the plainspoken, direct prose and the beautiful storytelling combine to produce a novel that is mythic, gritty, and unforgettable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)