Madeline's Rescue

Madeline, the smallest and boldest of twelve girls at a Paris boarding school run by Miss Clavel, falls into the Seine while walking along its bank and is pulled out by a stray dog the girls quickly adopt and name Genevieve. Genevieve moves into the school with them, until the stern trustees who oversee the building declare that a dog has no place there and have her thrown out, over the girls' loud objections and Miss Clavel's own evident reluctance. Genevieve finds her way back anyway, and the crisis resolves when she gives birth to a litter of puppies, enough puppies for the girls to share, settling both the trustees' objection and the girls' rivalry over the original dog in a single stroke.

Bemelmans tells the whole story in his familiar bouncing, insistently rhymed verse, and paints Paris in the same loose, slightly wobbly line and bright flat color as the original Madeline, with the twelve girls marching in their two straight lines past real landmarks, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, rendered with more affection than precision. It is a sequel that assumes at least passing familiarity with the first book but works fine without it, and its rhyme scheme reads aloud so naturally that children pick up whole lines after a reading or two and start reciting them unprompted, which is as much a measure of its success as anything in the plot. Young readers who already know the original Madeline tend to arrive rooting hard for Genevieve specifically because the first book gave the girls no pet at all, which makes the trustees' objection land as a real loss rather than an abstract rule.