Talk a walk across the sky with Mirette

Emily Arnold McCully’s Mirette is my kind of girl. The Caldecott award-winning Mirette on the High Wire is the story of a girl who is resolute and fearless. Set in the late 1800s, Mirette lives with her mother, who owns a boardinghouse in Paris. The boardinghouse always has interesting, lively characters—everything from acrobats to mimes. When a retired high-wire walker named Bellini enters the boardinghouse, this “sad-faced stranger” eventually changes Mirette’s life.

Mirette witnesses Bellini behind the boardinghouse walking on a wire. Her initial reaction was that he was “crossing the courtyard on air!” She watches him every day, but he does not want to teach her, because once someone begins, their “feet are never happy again on the ground.” Mirette, determined to learn how to walk on the high-wire, teaches herself to walk across the length of the wire. After seeing how unwavering Mirette was, Bellini finally teaches Mirette to do stunts on the high-wire. When Mirette finds out that Bellini is a famous high-wire walker, she beseeches him to tell her why he never said anything about it. She finds that he is afraid, and “once you have fear on the wire, it never leaves.” Together, Bellini overcomes his fear and Mirette fulfills her dreams.

The themes in this book are great to discuss with a classroom: Mirette has both determination and fearlessness while Bellini is virtually paralyzed by fear. If a teacher reads this book to a classroom, they could talk about times when they were afraid to do something and how they overcame that fear. I could discuss my fear of heights, and the incredible moment I had when I went parasailing. The classroom could also discuss times when they saw something that made their feet “unhappy on the ground.” Some moment in their life when they knew they had to do something or they would never be satisfied.

When I first read this book, I thought that many words would be beyond their comprehension if they read it alone. There are words like “boardinghouse,” “vagabond,” “leeks,” and “hemp” that I thought they would not know. After reading reviews on the internet, however, I have changed my view slightly. One fourth grade teacher acknowledges that there may be unfamiliar words, but reassures that “McCully always gives plenty of clues for the reader to determine the meaning of these words.” Perhaps in a third or fourth grade classroom this book could be used for independent reading, but I feel that in a first or second grade class it should be used as a read-aloud.

One of the most amazing things about Emily Arnold McCully’s book is that she drew the illustrations herself. The illustrations are watercolors that are somewhat blurry—they remind me of a dream that you cannot quite recall. Each of the illustrations is wrought with emotion. When Bellini told Mirette that she was afraid and could not face his fear, you can understand how sad and lonely Mirette is as she scrubs the floors. The kitchen is large, and the reader is reminded that the fearless Mirette is still just a small girl. The picture of Mirette learning how to do somersaults in the air is amazing; the high-wire is absent from the picture and the reader is allowed to feel Mirette’s feeling of flying through air. The night picture in the end is my favorite, but I do not want to reveal the end, so I will let you discover it for yourself. The final picture seems to suggest a new story with a different girl who has her own dreams and sense of determination.