The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery We are within the center of Paris, in an exquisite flat building occupied by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the luxurious but vacuous lives of her various managers. Ostensibly she acclimates to each stereotype of the concierge: fat, contentious, dependent to tv. However, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée could be a refined autodidact who worships craftsmanship, reasoning, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and insights, she scrutinizes the lives of the building's occupants, who for their portion are scarcely mindful of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old virtuoso. She is the girl of a monotonous parliamentarian, a gifted and startlingly clear child who has chosen to conclusion her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until at that point she will proceed to carry on as everybody anticipates her to act: an average pre-teen tall on juvenile subculture, a great but not an exceptional understudy, a submissive if a headstrong girl.