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Gordon, Gus

Finding François: A Story about the Healing Power of Friendship

40 pp. | Dial | July, 2020 | Trade ISBN 978-0-525-55400-4 $17.99
(2) K-3 Piglet Alice lives happily in Paris with her beloved grandmother. Even so, Alice thinks it would be nice to have "someone her own size to talk to" when grandmother naps or scary storms roll in. Hoping to find a friend, she tosses a message in a bottle into the Seine ("Hello! I am Alice"). When the bottle washes up on a faraway shore and into the hands of François (a dog), the young son of a lighthouse keeper, he returns the bottle, thus beginning a series of such profound (and entirely childlike) exchanges as "Hello Alice. I am François. Where are you?" "I am over here. What are you doing over there?" The astonishingly reliable bottle carries their messages back and forth across the sea--until Alice's grandmother dies and Alice stops ­writing. Fortunately, her new guardian, the tender antelope-seamstress Miss Clément, arranges a visit to François's lighthouse, where shared stories, lemon muffins, and laughter transform a correspondence into a ­friendship that weathers any storm. Clippings from "old found papers" speckle Gordon's warm watercolor and pencil illustrations with French words and phrases (as does frequent hand-lettered dialogue), adding both visual and narrative texture; the text's tone strikes just the right balance between earnest and playful. A tender and inviting reflection on the hope and renewal found in friendships.
Reviewer: Grace McKinney | Horn Book Magazine Issue: July, 2020

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