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Description: Twelve-year old Daisy Tannenbaum gets expelled from
school for punching a bully and sent to live in Paris with her Aunt Mill,
who teaches math at The Embassy School.
Terrible at math, with a chip on her shoulder the size of New Jersey, Daisy arrives to find her enigmatic aunt moonlighting as a cryptographer,
working to decipher an antique code used by Louis XVI’s secret service during
their covert operation to recover the infamous Queen’s Diamonds from Comtesse
de la Motte. Faster than you can
say, Quel horreur!, Daisy gets involved in a serpentine
plot involving the lost jewels, encountering spies, Russian gangsters, bent
antiquities dealers, an octogenarian diamond appraiser, the hyper-stylish
daughter of a jazz pianist, a seven-foot sewer crocodile and an apprentice cat
burglar who insists on calling her Grace Kelly.
What readers are saying:
"Daisy in Exile is a fun and charming mystery filled with interesting French
history, secret codes, and harrowing chase scenes along the streets, rooftops
and in the sewers of Paris. Fans of Nancy Drew, Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce
and Harriet the Spy will embrace Daisy."
—Jennifer, Littleton, MA
"Once again, J.T. Allen gives us another 5-star read, featuring a 12 year
old, Miss Daisy Tannenbaum. This is a middle grade novel that is equally
enjoyable by adults. I loved it!"
—Pam, Moonlight Reader
"Daisy in Exile is an entertaining, engrossing, and altogether fun read."
—Robert, Ann Arbor, MI
"I love this kid. It is always a pleasure following her around on her
crazy adventures. The bonus here is that it all happens in Paris, and it's a
very insider's view of the city and its history. This is sophisticated writing
but fun in every way and accessible to all, young and old."
—Fabienne, Los Angeles, CA
"If you are an adult and left a bit of your heart in Paris, you will love
this book since the city is probably the most important character after Daisy."
—Lynn, Arlington, VA
••••
Here are Chapters 1 and 2 From Daisy in Exile
1. A
Room of My Own
My own room.
First time ever.
I’d always been
thrown in with my older sister, Clymene.
It’s the most amazing thing having your own room, your own desk, your
own desk lamp you can turn on in the middle of the night without anybody biting
your head off; and nobody texting all night with their toad
boyfriend, messages swooshing away at all hours; or flinging your underwear
at you just cause you forgot to pick it up.
Not to say I
didn’t miss Clymene. That’s the weird part.
Right after we got
to the apartment and I’d heaved my suitcase onto the bed, Aunt Mill stuck her
head in the door and said, “Do you want to call and tell them you’ve
arrived?”
“No thanks,” I
said.
“Are you sure? I have unlimited international minutes on my
cell phone.”
“No thanks,” I
said again.
Aunt Mill cocked
her head. “Okay, well, I’ll just give a
quick call so your mom won’t worry.”
Knock yourself
out, lady, I wanted to say. And she could tell that’s what I wanted to
say. She seemed pretty sharp, Aunt Mill, like a lean, mean math teacher.
But no way I was ever talking to any of my family, ever. They could just
get whatever updates they wanted from Aunt Mill, with her unlimited international
minutes. Pretty soon they’d lose interest and wouldn’t even pretend to care.
Years from now, I’d meet my new little brother and they’d say, this is your
sister, Daisy, and he’d go, “I have another sister? Really?”
So, okay, let me
go back a little.
When we returned from Moken Island, which
you can read about in my first book, I’d missed about three weeks of school and
had to jump right in. You’d think maybe after you’d been shipwrecked, fought
off pirates, recovered a stolen treasure and survived a typhoon or two, your
classmates would give you some social cred. Not likely. Sixth grade
cliques at the Fairfield School had formed faster than buboes on a plague
victim.
I got tossed in with a new girl
named Lucia Sarir, who was tall and thin and walked like a giraffe and never
said anything to anybody. Her parents were from two different countries,
like Estonia and Kazakhstan, so she wore weird clothes, purchased in
Bulgrungastad or something. But once you
got past her shy-wall, Lucia was clever and funny and played killer chess. Trouble was, she got picked on
constantly. Especially by Martin
Blindenbok.
Martin would follow behind her and
mimic her walk while everybody laughed. Even
I pretended to laugh too, so Martin wouldn’t pick on me, which made me feel
like a worm.
So
no big surprise really when, one Monday, after a weekend of feeling entirely
wormy for betraying Lucia, I socked Martin Blindenbok in the nose. He’d snuck up behind her and knocked the
books from her arms. Martin is a whole
head taller than me and weighs twice as much as me, but I didn’t think about
that. I just let him have it. His
nose exploded blood and he fell back and hit his head on a locker and crashed
down in a blob.
Next
thing I knew I was in Principal Smootin’s office, getting expelled.
Good
move, Daisy.
Dad
came over to school. Mom, who was
monster preggers, had to stay home cause she had something called preeclampsia pre-term
labor, which meant she couldn’t get out of bed. After Dad talked to them, the school agreed to
send me to some child psychologist lady.
The
evening after my visit with the psychologist lady, who asked me a million dumb
questions, Mom and Dad had a humongo argument.
He’s a professor of archeology and she works for a textbook
publisher, so you’d think they could talk in a civilized way, but forget it,
tons of shouting, cups breaking, the works.
From upstairs, I
couldn’t tell what they were saying except for a few times when they got crazy
loud, like when Mom yelled, “Over my dead body.”
Next
day, at breakfast, they said they’d made a decision. They were sending me
to be home schooled by my mom’s sister, Aunt Millicent. Since I suck at math, and Aunt Mill is a math
teacher, Mom and Dad thought it would be a good idea. Only trouble was,
Aunt Mill lived in Paris.
I argued with them for like an hour. It was so unfair.
But later that night, Clymene came
over to my bed when the lights were out and whispered that she heard Mom and
Dad talking. She said they felt
terrible.
“Good,” I said, “they should.”
“No, Daisy, you don’t get it.
Dad was talking about how the school psychologist thought you were suffering
from post-dramatic trauma disorder from the experience on the island and that
you should be put on medication before returning to school.”
“Gross. No way I’m doing that.”
“That’s what Mom and Dad said. Mom was so mad Dad told her to calm down,
which of course had the exact opposite effect.
That’s why she was screaming, “Over my dead body.”
Oh.
Phone
calls were made. E-mails flew back and forth. It was settled.
What
did I know about Aunt Mill? She lived in
Paris. She was Mom’s older sister.
She wasn’t married and didn’t have kids.
She’d only visited a few times, when I was little. She always gave us weird gifts like Becassine
and Bleuette dolls, which are old French dolls that nobody ever heard of, but
which Mom insisted were collectors items and hid away somewhere.
So I really didn’t know anything about Aunt Mill.
Dad gave me his old laptop. Clymene lent me her
digital camera. Mom gave me her original
1985 addition of Agatha Christie’s
Complete Miss Marple Mysteries to read on the plane, which I loved. But then she ruined it by getting all teary and
reaching up from the bed to hug me before I left.
Because I was twelve and traveling alone, the Air
France people put a plastic pouch around my neck with my ticket and passport
inside. I got to be escorted onto the plane by my own stew.
Go geek girl.
All the little French families
sitting around me on the jet seemed so happy, kids talking in French to French
moms, while French stews in their pale-blue uniforms, hair perfect, scarves
perfect, everything about them French and perfect, handed out French magazines
and French earphones.
I tried to
read Miss Marple, but the stories
just made me worry about Lucia. Who
would protect her? Plus, I was ticked
with my mom for packing me off and then getting all sobby about it. Halfway through the flight I look down
through the clouds and saw icebergs, little cold things bobbing in the vast
blue. That’s the way I felt inside.
Aunt
Mill––dressed in the same kind of trim suit as the stews, only in pine green—stood
at the customs exit to greet me. She spoke to the Air France people in
fluent French as they signed my paper work. She’s not much older than my
mom and looked a lot like her, though younger somehow, thinner, blonder hair,
more—I don’t know—stylish. She has an ever-so-slight
limp, which you only notice really when she’s going up or down stairs. She practically smothered me with her hug.
We took a taxi
from the airport. As we neared the
center of the city, the streets got smaller and the buildings more old and crooked
until pretty soon we turned down a street that was barely wide enough for a
single car. Aunt Mill told me the French
name for her neighborhood but I promptly forgot it. She said it meant swamp in English and that
they drained a swamp four hundred years ago to build all these big fancy
palaces for all the rich fancy people who then got their heads cut off with a
guillotine. That part I remembered.
The taxi stopped in
front of these huge green doors that Aunt Mill called carriage doors. In the old days, people would drive in with
their horses and carriages. But now, inside one of the big doors was a
smaller door that we walked through.
I
dragged Big Bertha, my monster suitcase, across the bumpy courtyard as
Aunt Mill led the way. She called out,
“Sief,” and like magic, this scrawny, dark-haired, Raggedy-Andy of an eleven-year-old
came loping out from the opposite side of the courtyard. “We need help
with the suitcase,” Aunt Mill said.
We
entered an archway and climbed these crooked steps, so worn they sagged in the
middle. Aunt Mill hobbled up, hanging on
to the rail. Sief tried to grab Big
Bertha out of my hand.
“I can do it
alone, twerp-o,” I said.
Aunt Mill looked
down from the landing above and said something in French. Sief promptly let go of the handle and went
down and started pushing from below. We clunk-clunked up a flight and
then he started easing off without appearing to, then pushing again, easing
off, pushing, till I almost fell on him.
He grinned.
I shoved Big
Bertha down on him. He missed a step and knocked his chin. I yelled, “Hey, watch out, klutzoid.”
Sief just grinned
again. Eventually we got to a landing ten
thousand steps up. Aunt Mill had the door to her apartment open and while
I rolled Bertha in, she gave Sief some money.
I wanted to barf.
When I asked Aunt
Mill about him, she said Sief was half Algerian, half Mohican, and half
Puritan. When I asked her what that meant she said Sief’s mother died
last year and that he and his father lived across the courtyard and that he was
a very sweet boy and spoke fairly good English and that if I didn’t insist on
trying to kill him with my suitcase we might become friends.
She must have eyes
in the back of her head.
Aunt Mill’s
apartment was ancient. The living room
had a marble fireplace and walls with carved wood that looked like decorations
on a cake. There were books everywhere:
books in cases that ran to the ceiling and books piled in corners around potted
plants and books on the faded green couch and books piled on the fireplace and
in the fireplace too, old books, new books, French books, art books. You
could build a castle with all the books.
The living room gave
into a dining room with another fireplace and a round dusty table ringed with dusty
gold chairs. A chandelier with real candles instead of light bulbs hung
down from a plaster rosette in the ceiling. Across the hall was a tiny
kitchen with hardly anything in it and down the hall were three bedrooms, one
for her, one for me and the last for her study. The study had more books,
along with scrolls and charts and piles of paperwork, plus, in a corner, a
ginormous steel safe.
“What’s that for?”
I asked.
“It’s just
an antique,” said Aunt Mill. “Too heavy to move, so there it sits.”
2. Le
Saint Gervais
Aunt Mill woke me
at seven in the morning, Paris time. I’d been asleep about six seconds.
She said she was taking me to her school to do some testing. I had five
minutes to shower and throw clothes on. The shower heater either scalded you
or doused you with ice water, with no in between, unless you had the touch of a
safecracker. Then we sat down to warm milk with coffee, and yesterday’s
stale baguette with jam. Aunt Mill smoked half a cig by the open kitchen
window, telling me the whole time what a disgusting habit it was.
I borrowed an
umbrella for the dash to the Metro. She kept a dozen in a brass holder by
her door—a good thing because it is always raining in Paris. Always.
The sky was
dead-mouse gray. Wet cobbles glistened under vapor lights. People
walked hunched over, dragging on their cigarettes, bumping you off the sidewalk
as they passed. Handing me a Metro
ticket, Aunt Mill passed through the fare-barrier and mashed into the morning crowd.
I had no idea where we were going but it was pretty cool to be on the real Paris
Metro, even if everyone was churlish. Aunt Mill is not a morning person,
but I didn’t realize that at the time, so her silence on the ride over made me
feel like I was something heavy she had to lug around.
A brass plaque
marked the entrance to the Embassy School.
Early kids, dressed in school blazers, said “Bonjour Madame Millicent” as we came in. They eyed me,
exuding posh.
I got whisked into
a cubical with a glass wall and four computers, next to the principal’s office, while Aunt Mill
talked with an office bee named Mademoiselle Villand, a young woman with
angelic hair and a cherub face who could roast you alive with her booming
voice, which she used on kids running in the hall.
Aunt Mill went off
to teach. Mademoiselle Villand set me up to take tests on a computer.
The keyboard was different than an American keyboard, with the letters all
mixed up, but luckily it was just scroll and click and fill in A, B, C, or D—same
hyper-boring tests we take at Fairfield, except the computer would lock you out
when your time was up. I had a headache three minutes in.
Mademoiselle Villand
came in occasionally to check that I still had a pulse, and to set up the next
torture session. Normally, I would have thrown myself out a window, but I
was so jet-lagged I zombied through. At noon, Aunt Mill and I walked
around the corner to a tiny café where she had a twenty-minute chat in French
with the guy who ran the place, while I sat listening, understanding not a
word.
After lunch it was
more torture. I even took a French test,
which was a total joke. Then I waited for Aunt Mill, watching the rain
stop and start, watching the lead-colored daylight disappear, watching knots of
students traipsing out, gabbing in French and English and even Japanese.
I must have fallen
dead asleep. Aunt Mill woke me and apologized for taking so long and
asked if I wanted to grab a bite of dinner. Sitting up on the bench
outside the principal’s office,
wiping drool off my cheek, I had to think for a few seconds where I was.
We
metroed back to Aunt Mill’s apartment and ate at a place around the corner, called
Café Saint Gervais. She talked with both owners of this
place. The man shook my hand. The
woman kissed my cheeks and spoke English to me, telling me that her name was
Rose, and that my name, Daisy, meant Marguerite in French, so we were
both flower-named girls, the best kind of girls in the world, and that if I
ever needed anything, or was hungry, or wanted to get out of the rain, or
wanted a chocolat chaud, or anything, just anything, I should stop in
and ask for Rose.
Le Saint Gervais was kind of a dump really, unless you think of grungy furniture
from the 70s as a trend. But Madame Rose knew how to cook. We had saumon rillettes and gratin
dauphinois and rôti d’agneau aux herbes and then figues chaudes à
la mousse d’amandes. I remember all
that because Madame Rose wrote the names of everything down when I asked her
to. She was excited that I was excited about the food, but who wouldn’t
be—it was amazing. Aunt Mill ordered a bottle of wine and poured some in
my glass. I told her I was just a kid and didn’t drink wine, but she said
that kids in France could drink a little wine under adult supervision and that
it was a shame not to drink wine with such a good meal. It didn’t taste that great, kind of sour,
with a worn out smell. I had more fun
swirling it in my glass the way Aunt Mill did.
She
asked me to tell the whole story about Lucia and Martin Blidenbock, including
about punching Martin, so I did. She
laughed. “Good for you. Unofficially of course,” she said.
She started talking about crazy things that she and my mom did when they were
young but she made me swear never to tell anyone. I had no idea my mom
was such a terror.
At
the end of the meal, when we were stuffed to our eyeballs and Aunt Mill was
drinking an espresso, she pulled out the scores from the tests I’d taken.
She looked them over, sighed gravely, and said, “A French scholar you are not,
mademoiselle.”
She
said I tested well in reading comprehension, vocabulary, history, geography,
and life sciences. “Math, as predicted, is a problem and your French,
shall we say, is robustly remedial, contrary to your mother’s claim.”
“She probably fibbed about that. I’ve never taken a day of French.”
“Yes,
well, I suspect at that point in the conversation she was afraid I’d refuse to
take you on because of the language barrier.”
“So am I going to the Embassy School?”
“Heavens,
no. That place is for diplomat brats. You’d wilt there. Your parents and I agreed that I’d home
school you. But you’re already testing
past tenth grade in most subjects now.
You’ll need to take the sixth grade accreditation exam in the spring but
you could pass that tomorrow. So here’s
what I propose:
“For
math, I’ll give you a set of problems each morning. After you complete
them, whether it takes five minutes or five hours, the rest of the day is
yours. However, you can do nothing else until they’re completed.
You’ll also be required to read independently, picking a book from my library
or, in any case, a book I approve of, which can be almost anything, as long as
it’s not completely idiotic. We’ll call
that your honors independent study. In addition, you’ll be required to
keep a journal on Paris—on what you’ve seen, heard, smelled, read about, what
puzzles you about the city, what annoys you, what the people look like, eat,
wear, what the design of the city tells you, and so forth. You will be
required to write at least five pages a week in this journal, but I suspect
that won’t be too great a burden for you. In the meantime, I’ll look into
an appropriate language school.”
I nudged a bit of almond cream around on my plate. “So, when you say ‘the rest of the day is
mine’ you mean like I have to sit in the apartment all day or am I going to be
at the school with you?”
“Neither. Of course, you can sit in the
apartment if you choose, since it is technically part of Paris. Your journal will get very tedious if you
do.”
“So I just wander around?”
“If you choose. However, having a plan or goal each day will probably
make it more interesting.”
“What if I get lost?”
“I’ll give you a Paris Par Arrondissement map book, and also a cell
phone, in case you really get stuck. Of course, getting lost is one of
the best ways of discovering things. Plus, as you’ve probably observed,
there are people living here, and though they speak French, they’re quite
helpful, especially to polite little girls.”
“Won’t the police arrest me for cutting school?”
“Why would they? You’re a foreign tourist.”
This was clearly too good to be true. I knew there had to be a catch.
“What’s the catch?” Aunt Mill said.
“Huh?”
“You’re thinking, ‘what’s the catch?’”
I nodded. Was she a mind reader too?
“Well, you will have to finish your math homework each day, which won’t always
be easy, but aside from that, we’re in a city with 204 museums, 407 gardens, 7,000
cafes, 60,000 shops. There’s a historic plaque on every other
corner. Let’s take where we are now. You’re dining in a restaurant,
a seemingly unremarkable one, named after a Roman martyr from the Second
Century, when Jesus was still considered the hero of a fringe cult. Victor Hugo bought his daily bread around the
corner. Louis, Duke of Orleans, was murdered a few steps down the way,
sparking seventy years of war. Up the street, the Knights Templar had
their headquarters, until they were all arrested, accused of witchcraft, and
burned at the stake. This city is literally an open book, with infinite
pages, written in code, waiting to be deciphered. Now some people,
perhaps most even, wouldn’t know how to take advantage of that. But based
on what I know of you, I think you will.”
I said nothing. I was stunned. Aunt
Mill paid the bill and said a chatty goodbye to Rose and her husband. We
all double-cheek-kissed, an awkward thing for me, which made them laugh.
Aunt Mill and I walked home under umbrellas, everything varnished by the rain,
then chuffed up the bowed steps to her apartment. I got ready for
bed. She went into her study, “to do
some late work.” I had a long look in the bathroom mirror after I brushed
my teeth. Sometimes you just look in the mirror and don’t recognize the
person, or don’t like them particularly, or wonder why they do certain things, like
punch people in the nose and refuse to telephone their mother.
When
I came out of the bathroom, I saw Aunt Mill seated at her desk, examining an
old piece of paper—like really old, like the kind pirates made their maps
on—with a magnifying glass.
“Good night, Aunt Mill,” I said.
She looked up. “Night, Daisy. Get a good rest now.”
I nodded and padded off down the hall, brain not quite registering what I’d seen
until after I’d turned away: there was that safe, steel door swung open,
stacked high with old papers like the one Aunt Mill was eyeing with her glass. The safe might be an antique and “too heavy
to move” but it was doing more than just sitting there.
❦
Russian dolls reflected in a shop window in the Marais.
