THE FOUNTAIN

A cheeky fountain rebels against expectations in this colorfully whackadoodle tale, originally published in France.

The fountain presents its first gift (a hat) to a passerby on a Tuesday morning. Soon thereafter, and without any sort of pattern, other items appear in its waters, including couches, drums, balloons, and rocking horses. Loffredo sets her story in a world built to defy expectations, so much so that even the town’s citizens vary from ordinary-looking humans diverse in skin tone to sentient clouds with legs, reverse centaurs, people with wings and antennae, and more. As the fountain continues to give, the townspeople grow increasingly obsessed, staking out the fountain and forcing the mayor to regulate access to its presents. Then, on another Tuesday morning, the fountain disappears—but the community it helped to build remains. The freewheeling unpredictability of the narrative lends it both an air of mystery and a feeling that everything is all in good fun. Pages are suffused in the bright yellow of the fountain’s gifts, alongside eye-popping pinks, greens, blues, oranges, and browns. While the mystery itself is never completely solved, multiple readings yield various interpretations, particularly if children inspect hidden details on many of its pages, like the expressions on the fountain’s statues.

Enigmatic yet utterly enticing—youngsters will have a ball.