Thursday, March 31, 2005

I'm mad at Eleanor Cameron. I was really enjoying The Court of the Stone Children until I decided to look up the French artist Jean Louis Baptiste Chrysostome who features greatly in the novel. After twenty minutes on the Internet, I was forced to admit that he does not exist--she made him up! It makes me so mad because I loved the descriptions of his paintings and really wanted to see them to help me appreciate the story. It's just like A.S. Byatt's trick in Possession. Well, it was a good book anyway--a story of a little girl who wants to be "something in a museum" (a curator), and whose love of things from the past helps her to solve a two hundred-year-old mystery.

1 comment:

Voracious Reader said...

Having not read Ms. Cameron's book, I am loathe to weigh in on the name of one of the book's characters. Could it be an amalgamation of Jean Louis and Jean Baptiste and Jean Chrysostome, who were all real artists? Two of the named artists can be seen at http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/11/2003/hm11_3_26.html