**Tistou, being more beautiful than most people, living in a house more beautiful than most houses and with parents more beautiful than most parents, should not have been altogether amazed, when on his first day in a French village school, he is told that he is not like most people. But Tistou is upset and so are his parents, who look forward to the day when Tistou will take over his family's armament factory. So it is decided that Tistou will have to learn by doing and that is how he happens to meet Moustache, the gardener, and discover that he, the beautiful Tistou, is endowed with two very green thumbs. From then on strange things happen in the little village. The prison becomes a veritable garden as do the hospital and the slums. And Tistou's effect is far reaching, for away in a distant desert where a war is being fought, the guns manufactured by Tistou's father sprout not bullets, but flowers. So, think Tistou's family, times have changed and the huge arms plant devotes itself from then on to horticulture. It is only when Mastache dies and Tistou, going in search of him, climbs a huge tree-ladder into heaven, that it becomes evident that Tistou, christened Jean-Baptiste, is indeed an angel. Maurice Druon, whose adult books have been distinguished both in their scholarship and their literary quality, has conjured up a little classic here to be read both by children and adults.