For several generations of young readers who grew up with Eloise, Kay Thompson’s heroine who lives the high life in the Plaza Hotel, New York City has always seemed the perfect place to be a kid. Let’s ride up and down the elevators and travel on the subway and order room service and pour water down the mail chute! Let’s have virtually non-existent parents and make do with a nanny! Let’s exchange witty badinage with the chauffeur!

And it wasn’t just Eloise: what about E.L. Konigsburg’s Claudia, who runs away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, or Jules Feiffer’s Julie, who manages a highrise menagerie in Room With a Zoo?

In his second novel for children, Montreal-raised Adam Gopnik adds ­10-year-old Rose to this cast of savvy New York girls and pays wry homage to the city that is their playground. One day in Central Park, Rose sees a glass staircase rising over a lake, a vision reserved for her alone. It is her first glimpse of the parallel fantasy world of U Nork. In this world, Rose is the saviour. It is she, and she alone, who can protect U Nork from the evil designs of Ultima Theule, the Ice Queen, who is bent on its destruction. Lured into this alternate universe by the promise of a pet dog (her deepest desire), Rose is thrown into a hectic adventure.

A reluctant hero, Rose encounters many challenges. She has to solve a complicated rebus puzzle, evade the police, protect herself against a gang of armed Plug-Uglies, and battle the crafty Ice Queen. Like all epic heroes she is helped in her quest, in this case by a tough-talking­ midget gangster, an aging journalist/
historian, a trio of bookselling sisters, and her brother, Oliver.

Regular injections of action and plot-­reveals keep things moving. We learn interesting details about Rose, her friends, and the very nature of U Nork itself. But the plot isn’t really the point. The story is just an excuse for a rich and joyful gallimaufry of jokes and inventions, like a serial bedtime story told by a clever, curious, and quirky Dad with a gift for comedy – in other words, a story by essayist and New Yorker staff writer Gopnik. One imagines a chance spoonerism at the Gopnik dinner table leading to a discussion of what New York City would be like if it were even faster, ruder, and more crowded.

Hence: U Nork, a place where the buildings are 3,000 stories tall and a leisurely three-minute lunch is facilitated by waiters who shoot food from small cannons directly into diners’ mouths. And hey, let’s throw in fashions from the 1940s and aerial tightropes for couriers and giant pigeon taxis!

In his essay collection Through the Children’s Gate, Gopnik describes his childhood delight in old-style Jewish comics. He writes that “none of them talked about ‘jokes’ that you ‘told.’ Instead they talked about ‘bits’ that they ‘did.’” Rose’s story is full of comic bits, high and low, grown-up and juvenile, from wordplay to satire (in Rose’s progressive private school they do “interpretive dances of Orpheus and Eurydice to the music of John Coltrane”) to a literal manifestation of “paying through the nose.”

In the first chapter, Rose’s long-­suffering father asks an idle question about taxi drivers. We don’t even know it’s a joke until Gopnik delivers the punchline two hundred pages later. Rose’s adventures are ­punctuated with plums for the bookish – ­references to Hans Christian Andersen, Philip Pullman, and The Phantom Tollbooth abound.

Beyond the gags and allusions, is there a point? Tucked away beneath the giggles is the story of a youngest child who feels a longing for a world beyond her own safety zone and who experiences the reality of heroism. There’s a mild strain of social commentary, with questions raised about the commercialization of nature and the plight of the homeless.

More than this, however, The Steps Across the Water is a love story for a city of anecdotes and secrets, one of hidden places and hidden histories – in short, a city that is being threatened. (It is a love that is perhaps felt even more intensely by someone who moved there from Canada.) Gopnik’s affection is matched by fellow New Yorker contributor (and Canadian expat) Bruce McCall, whose deadpan illustrations portray the fantastic future as envisioned through the equally fantastic past.

And Eloise? There is a character by that name here, too, and she is the mean girl, the frenemy. “Eloise was very rich, lived on Park Avenue, and always acted quietly superior in a way that fooled you about how nice she was, because she wasn’t.” Come to think of it, Thompson’s Eloise was a bit of a monster, too. But Gopnik’s New York and U Nork­ are fundamentally benign, good-natured, and hopeful worlds, where even this Eloise gets the chance to redeem herself.