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diminished, we are starved’
(The Times, Magnus Linklater 29/06/05)

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Title: Saving Celeste

Author: Timothee de Fombelle

Translator: Sarah Ardizzone

Illustrator:

Publisher: Walker Books

Date Published: 2021

Format: Paperback

Genre:

Book Category: Fiction

Age Range: 9-11

Original Title: First published in French as Celeste ma Planete, Gallimard Jeunesse, France, 2009

Country of Origin: France

Saving Celeste

by Timothee de Fombelle
Age Range: 9-11

A lonely boy spends most of his time alone at home while his remote high-flying executive mother is working, but everything changes the day Celeste enters the fourteen-year-old narrator’s classroom. The boy, (we never know his name), can’t stop thinking about her, and when she suddenly disappears in the polluted smoke-filled high-rise city, where cars are stacked vertically and shopping centres are mile-high skyscrapers in the sky, he is determined to find her.

The boy tracks Celeste down to the 330th floor of tower 330 where he finds her sick and weak with mysterious markings on her face and body – "There, lying on the floor, shivering, her face pocked by a series of small marks, her arms and legs..." – He knows he must get her help so he approaches his mother, who works for a company that has the best healthcare in the city. Realising too late that he has inadvertently allowed this powerful corporation to take Celeste and that the sickness in her body is mirroring that of the planet itself – a message ‘they’ want to hide at all costs, the boy wonders if he’s too late to save Celeste and the Earth.

This is a wonderful allegorical tale from French author Timothée de Fombelle, with a pacy translation from Sarah Ardizzone. There are reminders throughout this short powerful novella of the planet’s most threatening challenge – climate change. The girl, who reflects what is happening to the Earth and the damage humans are doing to it, is aptly named Celeste – meaning ‘heavenly’ – and what is happening to her is anything but that! The futuristic and dystopian setting, where the world is run by large invisible and controlling corporations, must hide Celeste away so that the damage their actions are causing will not be discovered.

While there is a sense of foreboding as the story moves along with its race against time, which is fitting for the current climate change crisis, it also ends on an optimistic note with a clear message that, although we haven’t much time, it is still possible to fight to save our planet.

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