The Death Defying Pepper Roux

By Geraldine McCaughrean

“On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, Pepper had been awake for fully two minutes before realizing it was the day he must die”

As you can tell from the quote this book is about a boy, Pepper, who has been told that on his fourteenth birthday that he is going to die. He has been told of his informed death by his aunt mirelle, who has been told that fact by St Constance in a dream/vision. Yet Pepper doesn’t want to die yet, and so decides to swap lives with various people, one including a captain, to try and hide from Saint Constance. However pepper soon realises you can run but its hard to hide… the book follows pepper on a journey through various places and disguises and shows how pepper copes without the comfort of his family.

Pepper Roux is a character that every reader will love and take pity for in bad situations as there is nothing bad or mean about him. As the last pages appear you wish that he will get the happy ending that he always wanted and definitely deserves. Pepper is a brave character that gains confidence and knowledge throughout the book and slowly realises he can break some rules without getting caught. The characters pepper hides in are his dad , captain of a ship a telegram boy, a guardian, a journalist and a foreign legionnaire he learns lots of new skills and wherever he goes death seems to follow!

A great thing about the book is that it never gets boring as something new is always happening and new characters settings and scenes are introduced as pepper changes from person to person.

Secondly, the book includes weird and wonderful occurrences that really highlight McCaughrean’s ability to capture the reader’s imagination and really get the reader thinking and always on the ball. Also the way the author writes her sentences makes the different scenes flow from one to another without awkward brakes making the reader almost able to just sit back and enjoy the running commentary of an amazing journey.

However at the beginning I think that the plot thickened quickly and could have had more description and explanation, I also think that this was the case with some of his character changes and that McCaughrean’s could have developed this so it was easier for the reader to understand and read.

In the middle of all this there was a big mystery in the novel … why does Aunt Mireille think and believe Pepper is going to die at 14? What motivation could she behold have for terrorising and pepper and his family? For me this ruined the book a little as I do like mystery but I think none of this was really answered and I didn’t like how after finishing this book I still wanted to ask lots of questions. Yet I cannot decide whether this was a brilliant purposeful idea or a bad mistake as it did rest in my mind after reading for quite a while!

All in all I liked this book and had great pleasure and interest reading it because of the many events taking place and of course because of the death defying pepper roux! The storyline and wording was amazing! But I don’t think that it will really stand out for the good reasons when I remember it and I think I wasn’t really blown away by this book.

Review by Chloe 

year 8

7/10 stars