Madame Saqui: Revolutionary Rope Dancer is a nonfiction picture book. The biography transports readers back hundreds of years to pre-revolutionary France. We meet a family of tighrope perfomers and their tiny daughter, Marguerite, who yearns to join her parents on the tightrope.

But trouble looms. First, Marguerite’s family deals with the French Revolution. Then, they face her father’s career-ending fall from the tightrope. But Marguerite continues to love the circus. Without her parents’ knowledge, she finds someone to teach her the art of tightrope-walking.

Her public performance surprises her parents. And her success lures them back into performing. Finally, the rest of the book celebrates Marguerite’s life-long career as a tightrope performer.

I don’t often find picture book biographies set so far in the past. I loved the way Lisa Robinson weaved in historic details about the revolutionary fervor of the time. The art, by Rebecca Green, adopts the red, white, and blue palette of the French flag.

I loved the design of this book. It’s a very long, thin rectangle, which emphasizes the idea of height. It echoes the book’s theme about the inherent risk of tightrope walking. The endpapers are elegantly simple–blue horizontal lines stretched across the page, like tens of tightropes.

I’m delighted to have learned about this gutsy girl, and glad to have such a beautiful book on my shelves.

Madame Saqui: Revolutionary Rope Dancer by Lisa Robinson, illustrated by Rebecca Green (Schartz & Wade: 2020).