Title: Contes Jaunes
Author: Gérard A. Dubé and Andrée Soucie-Dubé
Date: 1986
Publisher: Guérin
ISBN: 2-7601-0077-4
Length: 176 pages
Illustrations: many colorful drawings
Quote: “Contes jaunes rassemble une variété de textes conçus spécialement pour l’initiation à la lecture chez les débutants.”
In other words, this is a French Canadian first grade reader. It will also work for home-schooled students, or students at schools that are enlightened enough to offer language immersion programs in the primary grades.
It might be too juvenile for high school students learning French. This is the sort of book n which dogs playing in the snow are shown not only sitting on sleds and making snowmen, but sitting down in a human position. There’s a Chicken Little story in which what hits Petit Poussin on the head is an apple, and the wise old owl tells him to eat it up quickly before someone else does. And Frère Jacques, and a French version of “This little piggy,” and similar nonsense.
In an ideal world, adult readers would be eager to share this book with children. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where, after France balked at supporting our war with Iraq, the few U.S. libraries that stocked children’s books in French discarded their collections...even when the communities the libraries served included Haitian, Algerian, and Ivorian immigrants. Still, one can hope that American adults will recover their senses. French may be less of an international language than it once was but it’s still the language in which many of the world’s great books were written.
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