Alice Atherton’s Grand Tour

During a meeting last week, someone asked me to explain what I was reading, and I said, “It’s like someone said let’s make the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris for kids….but also, you can’t use time travel.” And I stick by that. For many of us, that alone is enough to make you pick up this early middle grade novel. It’s just over 200 pages, or 4 hours on audio–and I listened to the audio of this one, which was fun.

This is a historical fiction middle grade novel set in the 1920s, and we begin in New York, with Alice Atherton, a ten-year-old girl who is a shadow of herself after her mother’s death. Her father is a publisher and decides she needs an exciting ‘grand tour’ of a summer and sends her off to his friends, the Murphys, who live in France. Quickly, Alice learns the Murphy’s live so differently than she ever has, and their exciting summer of education is about to unfold at the tutelage of a cast of educators straight from the 1920s ex-pat movement. Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Sergei Diaghilev, and Scott and Zelda FItzgerald all pay a visit to help the kids learn something that they wouldn’t get in a classroom. It’s truly a Midnight in Paris for kids type situation. When Mr. Murphy is like “my friend’s coming but he’ll want to go fishing” I was like “are you kidding me” and he was not! It’s a real treat for the adult reader to see it unfold, but I also know that kids don’t know what Midnight in Paris is or how contrived this can feel, even if the Murphys are based on real people.

This is the slightly pedantic (a word I learned from Midnight in Paris!) historical fiction for kids that parents enjoy a bit more than the kids, but I think the heart of the story, which focuses on Alice coming out of her shell as she gets to be free, will resonate with a lot of kids who maybe don’t necessarily need a “Grand Tour” to the riviera to unleash, but to see the ways that breaking the classroom mold can help them unpack the world around them.

This would be a fun audiobook for a road trip, especially if you have multiple generations in the car.