Rooftoppers

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.

“On the morning of its first birthday, a baby was found floating in a cello case in the middle of the English Channel.”

The book’s first line, describing the protagonist’s rescue after a shipwreck, frames the novel as a foundling story: one that follows the life of a character who is found as a baby and whose origins are therefore a mystery. These stories are typically odysseys of self-discovery, where the protagonists search for clues to their parentage. In Rooftoppers, the first (and most important) of these clues is the cello case that serves as Sophie’s lifeboat. This quote highlights The Link Between Place and Self-Discovery by introducing Sophie’s journey of self-discovery, which will be shaped by her connection to music, memory, and place.

“Give those things a narrow aristocratic face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs, and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out of her cello case and up into safety.”

In his first appearance, Charles Maxim, Sophie’s rescuer and guardian, shows his innate eccentricity in his looks, e.g., his refined, underfed face with its ever-quizzical eyebrows. His lifting of Sophie out of danger forges a link in her mind between heights and safety, an unusual association that will prove important.

“Miss Eliot would look around the house, which was peeling at the corners, and at the spiderwebs in the empty larder, and she would shake her head.”

The dour, unimaginative Miss Eliot embodies a character type common to the Victorian age, one to whom organization, efficiency, and conformity are the soul of life. A believer in “a place for everything and everything in its place,” she has no patience for clutter or for coloring outside the lines.