The Elegance of the Hedgehog

This book was quite hard to get into. The characters were at first very unapproachable. The book is narrated by the concierge of a fancy apartment in France, and by a twelve year old girl who lives with her family there. Both are pretty depressed, and hiding their true personalities. At the beginning of the book they both are just too intelligent and there is too much intellectual musing for me to be that interested or attracted to them. They both are extremely intelligent but choose to hide this and are very introverted and the twelve year old is even planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. I just didn't really understand or relate to them at all.

But once I got into the book, and the meeting of the two characters that the whole first half of the book was leading up to, the characters were changing and by the end I loved and cried for them.

So I still recommend it. Even though it was so hard to get into, the last half redeemed itself.