The Seven Chairs

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“In his lifetime he made seven chairs” sums up the plot of this
deceptively simple tale, about an unnamed man from an unnamed country
who, in an era that is not quite made clear, builds seven chairs. Some
chairs are for his own use; others are built

for customers. The chairs range in style from a primitive three-legged
stool to an intricate Louis XVI, but each is destined for an adventure.
The Louis XVI is stolen by pirates and ends up as a hairdresser’s
chair in a Louisiana beauty salon. A loveseat becomes a lifeboat for 15
shipwrecked sailors, who later donate it to the first church they can
find. Still another chair becomes lost and merely rots away in
obscurity.

With so many stories to tell, Lanteign picks her prose carefully,
leaping decades and even centuries in a single well-chosen phrase. Each
page strains under a wonderful tension in which much is revealed yet
much more is left to the reader’s imagination. Kovalski’s exuberant
illustrations, on the other hand, seize a pivotal point in each story
and arrest the reader’s attention with their warmth and humorous
detail. This is a book both young and adult readers will enjoy reading
over and over again. Highly recommended.