My name is Renee, and I’m the first protagonist of this book – the hedgehog, as it were. I’m a 54-year-old concierge who works in a building populated by rich and powerful people who barely notice my existence. I’m also a closet intellectual and I frequently try to prove that to you by digressing into asides about philosophy, culture, and other topics. I alternate between sniping at the apartment owners for their snobbish indifference to my lowly concierge self (an image I strive to maintain at every opportunity while blaming the rich apartment owners for buying into it), and terror that they may find out that I read loftier books than they do (I’m as much of a snob as they are, if not worse, but I guess we won’t go there – let’s keep things simple, even though this book is ostensibly higher literature). Given the owners’ apathy toward me, it’s not clear what I fear might actually happen if they learned that I was an intellectual. Probably nothing. But hey, this conflict keeps the book going and maybe makes some kind of a statement about French class differences. I guess you’d have to be French to understand. But you don’t have to be French to feel smug and superior about reading this pretentious novel. In fact, it probably helps if you’re not French because then you’re reading something foreign.

The story begins with PA Hedgehog explaining to his children about the problems that hedgehogs have in crossing the road to get to the park. Having listened to his father’s speech, Max asks his father how humans can cross the road safely. PA Hedgehog tells his son that he does not know and sets him the challenge of finding out. Then, too, my inner cynic has to cavil just a little bit at the unlikely perfection of the emotional harmonic convergence towards the book's ending. Mr Ozu seems more than a little too good to be true. And, for that matter, once you get away from the hypnotically, charmingly persuasive voices of the two narrators, the thought might cross your mind that maybe the other residents of the building aren't quite the shallow monsters they are made out to be throughout the book. Maybe the much maligned older sister, Colombe, deserves a break as well.

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The New Hedgehog Bookby Pat Morris. Illustrated by Guy Troughton.Part of the British Natural History Collection by Whittet Books. Published in 2006.

Who cares about these people? Why should I care about them? One's a concierge, the other's a privileged brat with the exact same hormones as every other 12 year-old girl on the planet. Now, you might say, that's the point, Barbery is trying to show that these people are marginalized, and look how beautiful they actually are in their minds and spirits. But they're not beautiful. I don't give a damn that they're smart. You know what, lots of people are smart. Smart people are a dime a dozen. That doesn't make you, or me, or Renee or Paloma a special beautiful flower. It makes them smart, but they're still completely uninteresting. Renee Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day. An old tramp (hobo) is not jealous of the rich, even those who never give him anything. Reneé muses "I've never given poor people credit for having noble souls" and concludes and that it's other poor people who the poor despise. Same goes for Paloma. She's precocious, fine. That's charming, I guess, but it's not redeeming. She wants to kill herself and burn down her family's house. Wow. That's really unique. I guess I should care about her "plight." Or... just maybe... she's exactly the same as every other precocious 12 year-old brat in the bourgeoise world and she'll get over it as soon as she discovers penis and marijuana. Paloma is the only tenant who suspects Renée's refinement. Although they share interests in philosophy and literature, nothing happens between them until the death of a celebrated restaurant critic who had been living upstairs.

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Hedgehogs are certainly noisy eaters as people who have encountered these animals ‘at table’ will testify; but what do they actually eat? Paloma reads, but is more of a philosopher-cum-analyst. She has an older sister, Colombe, who she sees as a noisy neat-freak, shallow, unemotional, fake, and annoying (the last of those is mutual). Some of this is normal sibling stuff, but it also feeds Paloma's ennui. Paloma craves peace, so Colombe plays music loudly, "She can't invade anything else because I am totally inaccessible to her on a human level". After assembling a squad of bad guys, kidnapping Belle, starting a forest fire, and causing chaos in Central City, Starline is finally ready to unleash his monstrous imposters: Surge and Kit! Will his meticulous planning be enough to defeat Sonic and Dr. Eggman? And, in the wake of the climactic battle, both the heroes and bad guys need some time to heal and regroup… except Dr. Eggman, of course, who is always ready to destroy that darn hedgehog. Can Sonic, Tails, and Belle escape the city, or will Eggman finally bumble his way to victory? Definitive Sonic comics scribe Ian Flynn joins superstar artist Adam Bryce Thomas for a story more than four years in the making! Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggresive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. The book has no tension but it does have some contrived action as well as a ludicrous red herring. The prose is riddled with sentimentality and cuteness, and the awkward "plot" serves as a skeleton for a host of trite, sophomoric ideas. A few basic philosophical problems are rehashed in reductive ways, and the narrators imagine that they invented these ancient conundrums.

Many small animals including hedgehogs and birds cannot escape from sheer-sided pits beneath these grids. A small ramp or slope in one corner of the pit enables the trapped animals to walk out – see BHPS leaflet ‘Ramps’. Other Dangers Don't misunderstand me. My issue with this book is not the literary name-dropping or the dime store philosophizing. Some authors can get away with this stuff, even brilliantly. Kundera, for example. The difference is that Kundera is interesting. Whereas nothing and no one in this book is anything but a one-dimensional bore.

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Children believe what adults say" and later "they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children."