In myth and legend, a hero’s passing from one realm to another usually entails danger and sacrifice. Rooftoppers, a Victorian-set novel with mythic roots, alludes to this rite of passage in its division of Paris into a street city and a roof city and in the toll of blood that its characters pay to cross from one to the other. When Sophie first climbs through the skylight onto the roof of her hotel, she discovers her knee to be “bleeding quite vigorously” (104). The wounding itself is not described—nor its pain noticed by her—giving it the ritualistic quality of a baptism or libation. Likewise, when Matteo breaks into the police headquarters, he leaves the windowsill drenched with blood, and when Sophie finally makes the leap of faith that lands her on her mother’s rooftop, “a rivulet of blood” runs from her knee (276). Injury and bloodletting are a condition of life on the rooftops, perhaps the inevitable price of its otherworldly freedoms. When Sophie first meets Safi, the tough-looking girl’s face is streaked with fresh blood, cuts and scars being part of the roof dwellers’ daily fare. After all, the sharp-edged tiles and cornices of the roofs are unforgiving, and as Anastasia tells Sophie, Matteo has had to fight the thuggish gariers tooth-and-nail for the right to dwell on the roofs at all: In his skirmishes with them, he has lost the tip of his finger and suffered a near-fatal stomach wound, and one of his opponents lost a hand. Finally, in the novel’s climax, Sophie and her friends must fight a bloody melee with the gariers to reach her promised land. In Rooftoppers, bloodletting and mutilation are a feature only of life on the rooftops, never of the prim and proper world below. It is as if the rooftoppers’ cherished liberty from the enclosed spaces and barred windows of the humdrum world also precludes their many comforts and protections.