Mirette on the High Wire

In a Paris boardinghouse run by her widowed mother, a girl named Mirette notices that one quiet, unassuming guest is actually Bellini, once the greatest wire walker in the world, now hiding out after a fall shattered his nerve for the rope. Fascinated, Mirette teaches herself to balance on a line strung across the courtyard, and when Bellini catches her practicing, he reluctantly agrees to train her properly rather than send her away. As Mirette's own skill and fearlessness grow, they begin to draw Bellini back toward the wire himself, and the book ends with the two of them, teacher and student now, publicly crossing a high wire together, his fear conquered as much by her example as by anything he manages alone.

Emily Arnold McCully, who wrote and illustrated the book herself, paints in airy, sunlit watercolors that place ordinary nineteenth century Paris streets and rooftops, laundry lines, chimney pots, market stalls, alongside the real vertigo of the wire acts, tilting her perspective sharply upward whenever a performer takes the rope.

The book carries a genuine emotional arc, fear overcome through mentorship running in both directions between teacher and student, and it suits five to nine year olds well in a single sitting; the courage of a child helping an adult find his nerve again tends to be what children remember afterward rather than the wire walking itself. Mirette herself is never shown as fearless in any simple sense, only as someone who wants the wire badly enough to keep practicing after every fall, which gives young readers a more honest model of courage than a character who is merely brave from the very first page.