Rooftoppers

Rooftoppers, a 2013 middle grade novel by Katherine Rundell, follows 12-year-old Sophie’s search for her long-lost mother amid the serpentine alleys and picturesque rooftops of 19th-century Paris. A coming-of-age story that blends realism with elements of fairy tales and myth, Rooftoppers highlights themes of self-discovery, nonconformity, and resilience within an unconventional portrait of Paris. Rundell, a longtime London resident and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, has been honored with numerous awards for her fiction, and in 2024, she was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. In 2015, Rooftoppers won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. The novel has been translated into more than 30 languages.

This guide refers to the 2014 Simon & Schuster paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, animal death, and gender discrimination.

Plot Summary

In the late 19th century, a ship named the Queen Mary sinks in the English Channel. Among the few survivors are an eccentric, unmarried scholar named Charles Maxim and a one-year-old baby girl. Charles discovers the child floating in a cello case a mile from the shipwreck, and, with no knowledge of her identity, decides to raise her himself. Knowing far more about literature than about people, Charles’s guardianship of the girl, whom he names Sophie, is loving but eccentric regarding diet and schooling. This, and Charles’s London house—a cluttered, unkempt mansion teeming with books and cobwebs—irritates Miss Eliot, a functionary of the National Childcare Agency, who warns that his custody of Sophie is temporary.

Miss Eliot also objects to seven-year-old Sophie’s taste for wearing boys’ trousers instead of dresses. Sophie insists on a faint memory of her mother wearing trousers and playing the cello; Miss Eliot counters that both are close to impossible. She says that Sophie’s mother is most likely dead since no women are thought to have survived the sinking of the Queen Mary. Sophie, however, clings to the dream of someday finding her mother; as Charles tells her, “Never ignore a possible” (35). Two years later, Charles takes Sophie to her first classical music concert, and she falls in love with the dulcet tones of the cello, which she says sounds like “singing.” Delighted, Charles buys her a cello of her own.

Soon after Sophie’s 12th birthday, two childcare agents, one of whom is Miss Eliot’s brother, observe Charles’s parenting style and deem him unfit to raise a child. They decree that Sophie belongs in an orphanage and that any noncompliance by Charles will be punished by up to 15 years in prison. In a rage, Sophie runs to her bedroom and destroys the cello case she was found in, smashing it to bits with a poker. She finds a brass plaque that was hidden under the case’s lining, denoting the Parisian address of the shop where the cello was made. It is Sophie’s first clue to her origins, and Charles immediately makes plans to smuggle her to Paris in the hope of finding her mother.

Nervous about their house being watched, Sophie brings only one parcel with her: her cello case, packed with a few items of clothing. In Paris, she and Charles visit the music shop, whose proprietor remembers the “beautiful” woman who bought the cello. He says that her face resembled Sophie’s and that she was “extraordinary,” particularly in the spirited novelty of her playing. He still recalls her lively, “double time” rendition of Fauré’s Requiem, the speed of which amazed him. His stuffy assistant, still scandalized by her irreverent treatment of the Requiem, remembers her name: Vivienne Vert.

Armed with a name, Charles and Sophie visit the city’s police headquarters but are given the runaround by the chief commissioner, who says that Vivienne could not have been a passenger on the Queen Mary and that the passenger records for the ship are lost. The commissioner also threatens Sophie with the orphanage if she and Charles do not return to England immediately. Charles suspects that the police have hidden the ship’s records to cover up their complicity in a criminal insurance scam that led to the ship’s sinking. Their only hope is to find a good lawyer who can force the police to turn over the records.

Meanwhile, Sophie has learned to climb out of the skylight of her hotel room and onto the roof, which feels “familiar” to her; she thinks that the rooftops of Paris may offer another clue to her origins. One night, she wakes up to find a strange boy in her room, who warns her to stay off the roof. This boy, Matteo, says that the rooftops are his home and “belong” to him. He says that she might make trouble for him if the police see her up there. The boy is a “rooftopper”: a child who lives entirely on the rooftops, surviving by his own wits and daring.

Desperate not to lose this latest clue to her identity, Sophie strives to prove herself worthy of “rooftopping.” Over the next few nights, she builds her muscles and works on her balance, teaching herself how to run on the rooftops and vaulting over the gaps between buildings. She wins Matteo over, and he even shows her his home on the roof of the city’s law courts, where he builds cookfires by the chimney stack and uses a bow and arrow to hunt birds for food. One night, Sophie brings him a big bag of food given to her by Charles, including rolls, venison, lemonade, and sausages. As they eat, sounds from all over Paris swirl around them, and Sophie hears Fauré’s Requiem being played on a cello. Evasive at first, Matteo finally tells her that it’s coming from the vicinity of the Gare du Nord, the train station. That area is dangerous because it’s the turf of the gariers, a violent gang of “rooftoppers” who live on the roof of the station. A few years ago, Matteo was stabbed and almost killed by one of them. He had to enter an orphanage to heal. To venture into that neighborhood, they will need the help of his friends.

In Paris’s Tuileries Garden, as arranged by Matteo, Sophie meets two rooftopper sisters: 13-year-old Anastasia and silent, 10-year-old Safi. They live almost entirely in Paris’s trees, which they scale with astonishing speed and agility. After meeting Matteo, they all go to the Notre Dame cathedral, the home of another rooftopper, Gérard, who lives in the bell tower. Gérard is a good “fighter” and has remarkable hearing. The five of them go to a rooftop near the Gare du Nord and listen for hours but hear no cello music. On the way back to Sophie’s hotel, they pass the police building, and Sophie asks Matteo to hold her by her ankles so that she can peek into a top-story window where the archives are kept. Seeing a way to ferret out the Queen Mary records, Sophie convinces the four rooftoppers to return with her the next night, and Matteo pries open the window for her. Searching the files, she finds a photograph of the band that performed on the Queen Mary on its doomed voyage—but the cellist appears to be a man, whose name is listed as George Greene. Prompted by Safi, Sophie notices that the cellist’s face closely resembles her own, and he’s wearing a woman’s shirt. George is actually a woman in disguise. The photo also provides George’s address, an apartment on Paris’s Rue de l’Espoir.

As she absorbs this knowledge, Sophie hears a voice calling to her from above: It is Charles, who has followed her over the rooftops, lugging her cello on his back. Shivering from the shocks of the night, Sophie tells him to meet her at George’s address on Rue de l’Espoir, and she and the four rooftoppers take off, heading into the stronghold of the vicious gariers. As soon as they near Rue de l’Espoir, the gariers creep quietly out of the shadows, wielding jagged lengths of piping, and a vicious battle ensues. After fighting valiantly, Matteo and Gérard lose their footing, and the girls come to their rescue, using roof tiles, chimney pots, and their fists, knees, and feet to beat the startled gariers into submission. Finally reaching Rue de l’Espoir, Sophie and the rooftoppers are joined by Charles, who climbs up a drainpipe from the street. Handing Sophie her cello, he urges her to play the Requiem in double time. Her playing, tentative at first, soars louder, clearer, and faster and is soon answered, echolike, by another cello from a nearby roof. As Sophie runs toward it, she hears it joined by a woman’s voice singing in French. Leaping over the last gap, she sees a woman sitting on the roof with her back to her, playing the cello. Frozen with excitement, Sophie finally lays a finger on the woman’s arm. Watching from the adjacent rooftop, Charles sees the woman cry out, kiss Sophie, and then take her up in her arms. As she swings her around, the two of them look “less like two strangers and more like one single laughing body” (277).