The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (review)

On the day of Paul (Pepper) Roux's birth, his morose aunt announced she had been visited by Saint Constance, who revealed to her that the poor child would not live to fourteen. In a collective act of consummate gullibility, the family believed her and spent more than a decade preparing Pepper and themselves for his demise. On the fateful birthday, Pepper fees his home and hijacks his father's merchant ship; in yet another act of consummate gullibility, the crew accepts him as its new captain. If Pepper is not exactly the doomed wretch he is supposed to be, neither has his father been an upstanding captain: L'Ombrage is a coffn ship, scuttled for the insurance money, and Pepper survives the sinking only to believe he has temporarily cheated Death. One step ahead of the saints and angels, he bounces around Provence from misadventure to misadventure as, variously, a matchmaking deli-counter clerk; a newspaper reporter specializing in good, if bogus, news; the assistant to a shady horse dealer; a telegram carrier limiting his deliveries to happy tidings; the miraculously recovered husband of a widow; and an enlistee in (and deserter from) the Foreign Legion. In consecutive acts of still more consummate gullibility, everyone he encounters accepts his ruse since, as McCaughrean frequently reminds her readers, "people see what they expect, don't they? Or do they see what they choose?" As the questions suggest, an undercurrent of philosophy runs beneath the comic antics, as the author takes wry pokes and jabs at a gamut of collective beliefs, from religious pieties to political protests. This is a thinking kid's comedy, heavily spiced with action and fnished with a lingering taste of self-refection.