Publication Date: May 4, 2025
Jacquelyn Pajot is a nine-year-old American girl whose excitement over a solo visit to her grandmother in Paris is soon diminished by the discovery that the grandmother is far more devoted to dragging her to church every day than she is in showing her the much-anticipated sights of the city. Jacquelyn’s despair is remedied when she meets a pair of local girls, Nicolette and Genevieve, who are only too happy to lead the American astray. Jacquelyn, to her giddy astonishment, finds herself cajoled into joining her young companions in singing for money on the streets of Montmartre and leg kicking for laughs before the doors of the Moulin Rouge.
Jacquelyn’s joy over this ‘new’ life is tempered when she learns the circumstances of Genevieve’s father, a charming but financially struggling cobbler. Employing her own creative skills to produce a flier, Jacquelyn devises an advertising campaign that quickly spirals out of her control and into the hands of her more mischievous friends. By means both legal and not, the two French girls set a dubious course that has Jacquelyn flirting with the prospect of prison, purgatory and, most perilously, her grandmother’s righteous indignation.
Rick Steigelman has penned quite a creative tour of Paris through the eyes of an American nine-year-old girl. Jacquelyn Pajot has been sent to spend a week with her Grand-mère in the shadows of the Eiffel Tower. But Grand-mère’s idea of the week is to act like a proper French citizen, not a tourist.
The Cobbler’s Crusaders is a spirited following of Jacquelyn as she stumbles upon a way to escape her Grand-mère’s dull routine of church and daily social gatherings of the town’s widows. Jacquelyn meets two other nine-year-olds who know how to get around the parameters set by adults. They will not stand by and let Jacquelyn long to see both the grand and the ordinary beauty amongst the streets of Paris.
One of the girls’ fathers, Monsieur Joly, is endeared to Jacquelyn as he takes her right to the top of the Eiffel Tower. In forming a friendship with these Parisians, Jacquelyn becomes involved in saving Monsieur Joly’s cobbler shop by papering all of Paris with advertisements to bring him business.
The initial idea of a flyer quickly gets out of hand as the artwork is “improved” to be more eye-catching. The story is told for adults in much the same way as the classic tale of Eloise is told for children—full of antics as the girls pull a fast one over on the adults—but then have to adjust their charade as the fabrications begin to unravel. However cheeky the plot is told, the childlike mischief got to be a little much toward the end.
The Cobbler’s Crusaders is a rollicking story of young girls who show their new American friend how to outwit her stodgy Grand-mère and play amongst the streets of Paris. 
Aside from publishing one novel, The Hope of Timothy Bean, Rick Steigelman has placed works of creative nonfiction in Superstition Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Smoking Poet, Hackwriters and Cosmoetica, and had a story about ditching his mother in London earn second place in the Men’s Travel category of the Traveler’s Tales Solas Awards competition. Born and raised in Muskegon, Michigan, Rick moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, after which he descended into a life of bartending. He now lives a more responsible life there with his wife and daughter.
