Madame Eiffel: The Love Story of the Eiffel Tower

K-Gr 2—In this fairy tale about the Eiffel Tower, Eiffel is a "happy engineer: young, successful, and in love." His wife Cathy is the "prettiest girl in Paris" with a penchant for traveling. They go on adventures until Cathy gets depressed and doesn't want to get out of bed. Eiffel builds her a tower, a "railway that takes us up to the clouds in a blink" to get her some fresh air, which instantly cures her. As a comment on clinical depression or gender dynamics, the book falls flat, and the awkward and stilted rhymes, translated from French, definitely don't help. The illustrations, however, are engaging and clever. The spidery black lines and triangular grids echo the lines of the Eiffel Tower, and the bobble-headed characters are sweet and freckly, all with rosy pink highlights. There is no back matter about the real Eiffel Tower, and the true story of Eiffel's reasons for building the tower have nothing to do with his wife.