Day 25: The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean

Pepper’s Aunt had a dream. St. Constance came to her and told her Pepper would die by the time he was fourteen.  Pepper has spent his whole childhood preparing to die. Now it is the morning of his fourteenth birthday and Pepper wakes up alive. Pepper decides to go for a walk so that he will not burden his parents when the terrible event occurs. When he gets to town he has a crazy idea, to get on his father’s boat and head out to sea. What follows is an over the top adventure as Pepper travels around France, changing names and occupations all in an attempt to cheat death. At different points, Pepper is convinced that the Angel of Death was confused and took someone else in his place so he tries to make things right. I was excited to read this book. It was on quite a few best book lists and has been talked up a lot. The book did not live up to the hype. There was way too much going on in this story. The beginning is promising, boy heads out on a sea adventure but the story gets bogged down with too much emphasis on this Angel of Death aspect and Pepper’s guilt at being alive. At some point, even the simplest of people would realize that they were not going to die and just live but it takes Pepper entirely too much time to get to this. I do not think many kids will stick with this book, I know I had a hard time and ended up flipping through to get to the end. If you do have any takers the book would be for fifth and sixth graders.