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Youth
Nov 2006 |
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Dear all,
The Youth Festival will start tomorrow at the French Institute in London (November 15-18). It will enable French and British kids to share moments with great French and British authors and illustrators. For the occasion, we would like to present you a selection of children's and teenagers' books that should find their way into English so that more British children could discover them.
Let's start with the younger readers. Many authors chose to turn our childhood stories upside-down, giving them a new life. Geoffroy de Pennart's Chapeau rond rouge wears a round red hat on her head but apart from that, differs “somewhat” from the little red riding hood of our childhood tales... In Peau d'âne, the picture book is accompanied by a CD and a final fascinating commentary aimed at parents on the origin of the story, the symbols and oral tradition which gave rise to it. Through her drawings, Nathalie Novi demonstrates a creativity rarely equalled to confer on this story all the magic and mystery contained within. It is thanks to this kind of retelling that stories lay claim to an eternal existence. In Le voleur et le magicien, the enchantment experienced by the reader derives of course from the text but perhaps above all from the drawings. Aurélia Fronty invites us into an imaginary world that is simple, vital and sophisticated and from which one has to tear oneself away.
Another moving and committed picture book is Le Géant de la grande tour by Carl Norac. It raises an important question for children : if one is big, is one necessarily more powerful?
The books we chose particularly reflect our Festival main theme which is multiculturalism and travel through time and space. In Ce qui arriva à M. et Mme Kintaro by Muriel Bloch and Aurélia Fronty, a gently comical tale from Japan, children will discover some of the customs of a highly-developed, thousand-year-old civilisation, as well as learning to ask questions about the relative values of all cultures. Zau's Hiroshima is a very poetic picture book that focuses on the issue of the transmission of memory. In Le Moyen Âge expliqué aux enfants, Jacques Le Goff also explains to children the long and fascinating history of the middle ages with great clarity, vivacity and wit.
But there is more to children's literature than illustrated books, so here is a selection of three novels for teenagers. C'est la vie, Lili is the unsettling journal of a pre-adolescent. Valérie Dayre delivers us a novel that reveals impressive literary qualities. She accepted to answer our questions on children's literature. Anne Vantal evokes Félicien's painful quest for his North-African roots in Un été outremer, when, being an adopted child, his desire to know where he comes from assumes a new urgency. With his intriguing La Porte du temps eventually, André Benchetrit reminds young people of the necessity of a gateway between past and present, between them and their parents.
We truly hope that you will enjoy these books as much as we did, and would be very happy to have your reactions and discuss this selection.
Hervé Ferrage, Sophie Moreau and Bettina Salvioni.