`The Pull of the Ocean,' by Jean-Claude Mourlevat

"The Pull of the Ocean," by Jean-Claude Mourlevat, translated from the French by Y. Maudet; Delacorte ($13.95)

One of the many voices in "The Pull of the Ocean," the award-winning novel by French children's writer Jean-Claude Mourlevat, belongs to a novelist. Through his window one night he spies a pack of dirty, tattered children running through the darkness with the police in close pursuit, and he thinks, "Apparently there was a hunter and some rabbits in this story. And you know what? In this kind of scenario, I always side with the rabbits."

The scared, running "rabbits" he sees are the seven boys of the Doutreleau family. Reading the lovely, poignant story of their survival, you'll side with them, too.

The six older brothers are all twins - three pairs aged 14, 13, and 11. The youngest, Yann, is also the most unusual. "Yann came last and alone. Like the period at the end of a sentence." A sensitive, mute 10-year-old, he's no taller than a toddler, but has the sad eyes of someone much older. Yann never speaks, but the twins always know exactly what he means to say. "Yann says things in signs," his brother Fabien tells us. "He just mimics, which is worth a thousand words." The boys' parents are poor and abusive and they live in squalor on a decrepit farm - until the night they run away.

We, the readers, know about their disappearance from the very beginning. Their fantastic story is being re-created after the fact, in a continuous narrative told from different perspectives.

In the first chapter a social worker tells us about how she visited the Doutreleaus' farm the day before the boys left home. Then we hear the voices of the brothers describing the rainy night they left, then that of the woman who saw them on a train heading toward the coast.

Younger readers will no doubt find this change of perspective magical, not only because each voice is so distinct but because the characters who watched the same things happening see them differently. The result is a touching in-it-together feeling: No one person knows the truth, but together we can figure it out.

The bare facts of Yann's family have been drawn from the story of Tom Thumb, an old folk tale made famous to French children by Charles Perrault. While the German version of the story may be more familiar to American kids, this one was no less, er, grim. The father in that story was too poor to feed his seven children, so he set out to abandon them in the woods.

The parallel between the old nursery story and the realities of today's world is pretty clear. The Doutreleau kids run away because they think their father wants to hurt them, too. They suffer mightily during their escape, from hunger and fear and the vicious blisters on 11-year-old Victor's feet. But they're united in their desire to reach the ocean, which they somehow believe will be their salvation.

Magic is alive in this story, but in a fairly solid, real-world kind of way. In a quiet, quirky way, the novelist acts as a kind of reporter, piecing together these could-almost-be-true events in a way that feels all the more honest because of its variety of narrators. Indeed, Mourlevat plays overtly with the ideas of fact and fiction. One character says, "There's a big gap between what they write in newspapers and the truth." But that writer, the one who'd holed up in a friend's cottage to work on a novel when he saw the Doutreleaus making their escape, gave up on what he was writing when he realized that the true story unfolding in front of him was more amazing than anything he could make up.

By the book's end we're left with a beautiful image that's as fantastic as it is hopeful, which shouldn't surprise us. Mourlevat's novel is like a fairy tale in its own right, and its appeal - and the lessons it has to teach - should prove just as lasting.

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(c) 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.