No One Expects The Inquisition

Notre Dame, Paris, 2017. 

The Inquisitor's Tale, Or, The Three Magical Children And Their Holy Dog
By Adam Gitwitz
Illuminated by Hatem Aly

My younger son and I have this routine where every other night I read to him at bedtime. Sometime last year we started on the Harry Potter books, and we have been working our way through them, one after another. As we started "Order of the Phoenix," though, we both felt like we could use a break from Hogwarts.

We switched to "The Inquisitor's Tale," which my older son read and enjoyed a couple years ago. (Come to think of it, my older boy needed a break when we got to "Order of the Phoenix," too. It's the longest book in that series.)

We loved "The Inquisitor's Tale." I might have liked it even more than he did. A couple times, when he was really tired, I looked over and noticed that he was already asleep, and then I kept on reading silently to myself because I was enjoying it so much.

Set in France in 1242, "The Inquisitor's Tale" is a well researched look at medieval European life that's also a fantasy adventure with jokes that kids will enjoy. (My son especially liked the lactose-intolerant dragon whose farts are deadly.)

My boys and me at the Chateau de Vincennes,
outside Paris, 2017. 

The three magical children of the title are peasant girl Jeanne, Jewish boy Jacob and the dark-skinned oblate (monk-in-training) William. Their dog is a greyhound named Gwenforte, who appears to have been resurrected 10 years after saving the life of Jeanne when she was an infant.

Their magical powers are mysterious. Jeanne has fits in which she sees visions of the future. Jacob can heal wounds. William has superhuman strength. Other people don't know what to make of them. Some think they are saints, while others think they are devils who should be burned at the stake. The two points of view may not be as dissimilar as you might think. As one priest explains, saints always end up getting burned at the stake, or dying some other horrible death. It's part of the deal when you're a saint.

The title of the novel gives you a clue as to its structure. Like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, "The Inquisitor's Tale" has multiple narrators: a barkeep, a beggar, a nun, a monk, a blacksmith, a traveling Scotsman, a nobleman and so on. None of them are entirely reliable narrators, and neither is the central narrator, a mysterious traveler who gets the others to piece together the story of the three children and their dog. In keeping with the medieval theme, there are also illustrations in the margins of many pages, like an illuminated manuscript.

If all this sounds a little too complicated for an 8-year-old, well, maybe it is. Every few pages I had to stop to explain something about the narration or the history. There is even some pretty deep exploration of Jewish and Christian theology later in the book. (Note that this is not the same thing as saying it's a *religious* book. Organized religion doesn't come off terribly well here, as a matter of fact.)

I don't know about your kids, but my 8-year-old is pretty adept at tuning out the stuff he isn't interested in and paying attention to the adventure and the fart jokes, or whatever else catches his imagination -- and I never really know what his mind is going to latch onto. One day we were eating lunch and he said something about "the cheese of life." I had no clue what he was talking about until he reminded me about a part in "The Inquisitor's Tale" where Jeanne waxes poetic about the importance of a  particularly stinky cheese. (Well, she is French, remember.)

Adults may want to read the annotated bibliography at the end of the novel, where we learn more about the historical and legendary sources for the fictional story. As you might have guessed from her name, Jeanne, the peasant girls who sees visions, is very loosely based on Jeanne D'Arc, or Joan of Arc. As you might not have guessed, Gwenforte is based on an actual 13th Century French legend of a holy greyhound known as Saint Guinefort.