Marie Quatdoigts

The interesting thing about Roger Des Roches' Marie Quatdoigts is its rather unusual point of of view--it's not exactly first person, but rather like reading a transcript of a conversation where only one of the two speakers is recorded. In other words, we see everything Marie "Quatdoigts" Gladouas (the young protagonist, who has, as you can surmise from her nickname, four fingers on each hand) says but nothing else in terms of narration or how other people respond to her words. It actually works pretty well as a story-telling device, though with a rather artificial use of rhetorical questions (e.g., "What's that? You want to know why I'm here? Well, I'm here because . . ."). The middle portion of the book is told from another character's point of view (her best friend, Roger, who has red hair and thus joins with Marie in their homemade Bizarro Club) in the form of diary entries. The book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as social outcasts Marie and Roger find their friendship threatened when Marie finds a boyfriend--someone with six fingers on each hand! It looks like there's three more in the series, and I would probably read them if I saw them at the library like this one.