rouen

From our  place in Giverny, we were able to take some day trips. One day trip was to the city of Rouen.

Rouen is mainly famous for being the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake:

But it also the home of the Rouen Cathedral, made famous by a series of paintings done by Claude Monet (do you see a theme?)

I'm holding a postcard of one of Monet's paintings!

I tried to channel some of Monet's artistry by making my own sketch of the Rouen Cathedral:

I had a very "impressionistic" result at least:

There were many other fine sites to see in Rouen, which was a smaller and calmer city than Paris. Such as this very cool, ancient clock (you could take tours to see the inside):

And a sign signifying a whole street of pie! Yum! I imagine each house having its own specialty--apple, blueberry, cherry...

The Sasquatch says it doesn't really translate to Pie Street, but I don't care.

But instead of pie, there were frozen macarons.

I was not really that disappointed.

And there was this beautiful, old carousel that had just been restored:

I love the animals!

But I have to admit, my favorite place was going into the bookstore:

Because there I found...

Oh la la! Is it really my book?

a French copy of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon!!!

or  as it's known in France as, La Ou La Montagne Rejoint La Lune!

C'est magnifique! J'adore Rouen!

ALA, part 2.75

After the luncheon, there was just enough time for me to run to Listening Library's ( Where the Mountain Meets the Moon audiobook makers!) Lend your Voice mobile:This was a really neat event! Listening Library was making a "crowd-sourced" audio book of The Wizard of Oz-- anyone interested in recording a section could come by to participate!

Now, I have a little bit of a Wizard of Oz fixation. For any of you who have read The Year of the Dog, you'll know that the main character in the book wants to be Dorothy in the school play but has that dream destroyed when a friend says that Dorothy is not Chinese. Well, that really happened to me! So when I received the e-mail about the audiobook, I jumped at the chance to maybe make my Dorothy dream finally come true!

All I needed was for the section I received to have Dorothy saying something....anything...

And it did!

My line?

"But I don't want to live here," cried Dorothy. "I want to go to Kansas, and live with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry."

Squee! My fifth grade dream fulfilled!

#7 on the NY Times!

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is #7 on the NY Times Children Bestseller list!! WOW!!!

I never thought I'd see the day when a book of mine would be on that, truly. This just goes to show the power of librarians!! They are more powerful than Al Roker!

The only small (very, very small!) downer is that the children's list is only printed when they have children's reviews...which is once a month. I have to hope that the book stays on there for a month if I want to get a real newspaper printed copy of the list (which I very much want because I don't know if this will ever happen again!). Now, I am really stocking up on the jade bracelets.