![]() ![]() ![]() What bothered me was the age of the characters: Zazoo is only 13, and while she’s labeled as precocious in the novel, that’s still a bit young to be taking up with a 16-year-old, even in 1980-something. ![]() Not the story per se: Zazoo and the boy on the bike, Marcus, develop a friendship while sending postcards back and forth, which evolves into love. There is a bit of a love story, and honestly that’s the only thing that really bothered me about the book. ![]() It’s delightfully complex and revels in shades of gray Grand-Pierre is neither a villain nor a hero, but rather just human. The book reserves judgment: Zazoo is, in many ways, just collecting facts, piecing an old puzzle together. For that reason, it becomes a bit of a war book Grand-Pierre has a history in World War II, perhaps of good, perhaps not. It jumps through time, giving us not only a portrait of Zazoo’s upbringing, but of the story behind the village and Grand-Pierre’s legendary stubbornness. Zazoo is a quiet novel, poetically written, with spare language that evokes a strong sense of place. She’s been basically happy in France, but in this turbulent winter her life is about to turn upside down. She doesn’t remember her birth home, and Grand-Pierre doesn’t talk about it. There’s nothing really remarkable about that, except that Zazoo is Vietnamese her Grand-Pierre (not her grandfather) took her from her country at the end of the war, when she was three. Zazoo is a 13-year-old girl who lives in a small village in France. ![]()
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