This book has longer, smaller text on more pages than I expected. So it took all of my allotted thirty-minutes reading time. Especially because the illustrations have lots of detail that just begged to be pored over. It’s about a girl who lives in a top floor suite of a very posh New York hotel. She is constantly all over the place, in and out of the ballrooms, conference rooms, fine dining areas and all the other places guests never see- like the boiler room and the switchboard (tells you how old this one is!) My she is quite the character! Full of smirks, self-importance, lots of imagination, and easily gets cross! You can tell from expressions on the adults around in the pictures that she really tries the patience of many, but has the indulgence of others whom she’s charmed. She scurries all around and gets into everything and has a grand time (of course also getting into trouble). I can well see how this book has stayed in print for so many decades. WHY did I not know this one as a child? It’s great.
Must add: there’s one fantastic fold-out page that opens up vertically, a diagram showing Eloise’s escapes up and down the elevators and stairs- delightful and obviously been handled by many readers before me.
Oh, and Eloise skates! Ha ha. She’s never pictured skating (thought I’m sure she would, through those long hallways) but on one page she dives to the floor in a crowd claiming to have lost her skate key, and on another she primly says she clashes her skates on purpose sometimes, and there’s the key forgotten on the floor if you look close (and know what it looks like). This made me chuckle, because I happen to have watched a video (just before my accident) of someone who actually bought a set of old-fashioned metal clasp-on skates, and tried using them (they handled quite well!) and she talked about how her grandmother who skated would always mention being careful not to loose her skate key, and then on the video she did just that- lost it in the grass and had to go back looking. So I laughed.
Borrowed from the public library.
