Eloise and Nanny, from the Eloise books.
Tonight the Daughter chose Eloise for one of her bedtime stories, which made me happy, as the Eloise books are just a joy to read aloud. Author Kay Thompson writes in exactly the way a breathless, over-sugared, over-pampered rich six-year-old would talk: lots of run-on sentences or sentences that simply stop in mid-thought; sudden jolts from one topic to another; subtle alliterations and wordplay; and even the occasional phonetic hint of a snooty British accent. And Hilary Knight's illustrations are also a delight, with surprises lurking around every page -- such as an early page where, as Eloise recounts the way she rides an elevator to the fifth floor and then gets out and skips up the stairs to the seventh floor so she can ride the same elevator again to the fifteenth floor before taking the stairs up yet again and so forth, the opposite page turns out to have a "gatefold" picture depicting Eloise's elevator journey up and down the hotel.
What was most fun this time was that, in the books, Eloise is six, and so's The Daughter. So Eloise is, in a way, in her peer-group. Cool!
An informative website on all matters Eloise can be found here.
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