Pierre & Paul: Avalanche!
by Caroline Adderson
illustrated by Alice Carter
Date: 2020
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Reading level: C
Book type: picture book
Pages: 32
Format: e-book
Source: NetGalley
Told half in French and half in English, switching continuously between both languages. Simple text and contextual clues make the story easy to understand for emergent readers in both languages. Excellent resource for French-immersion students.
(synopsis from Goodreads)
This is a very simple--almost to the point of being ridiculously boring--story that's basically just a vehicle for teaching language. As such, I don't really see it having broad appeal beyond the classroom.
Pierre and Paul are friends. They're also explorers. They imagine they're climbing the Himalayas. But nobody remembered to bring a snack! So they go to Pierre's house to make one. They decide to make a sandwich, which ends up so big that they end up climbing it like a mountain. But then the mountain collapses... into a salad.
Like I said, the story is pretty weak. The value in this comes from the inclusion of both French and English to tell the story. The languages switch back and forth, in what is probably a natural way for bilingual readers. I can see this being of use in French-immersion classrooms, or for children who are learning both languages.
That said, however, it's going to be confusing for readers whose main language is English. Not only do you have to contend with all the French words, you also have to adapt to the totally bizarre (to those used to English, anyway) punctuation. Extra spaces around the punctuation marks, dialogue where the speech attributions aren't set off, and em dashes for continuing dialogue are bound to be confusing for those not familiar with these conventions. I took years of French immersion in elementary school, and continued learning up to the university level, and I still have trouble with sentences like this:
« Ça ne fait rien, dit Pierre. Il prend un grand bol. Voilà ! »
In English, it would be as if I wrote:
" It doesn't matter, says Pierre. He gets a big bowl. Voilà ! "
Aside from the punctuation weirdness, there's that action sentence right in the middle that's not spoken and isn't set off in any way. French speakers are surely used to this, but English speakers won't be. The fact that there are also sentence fragments that are half English and half French doesn't help:
Ham and fromage.
Laitue et cucumber.
Zut alors! Talk about making a monolingual reader's brain hurt.
So, like I said, this would probably work best for kids who are learning the language or are already bilingual. The weakness of the story, though, might bore those who are already fluent in English and French.
Thank you to NetGalley and Owlkids Books for providing a digital ARC.
Premise: 2/5
Meter: n/a
Writing: 3/5
Illustrations: 3/5
Originality: 3/5
Enjoyment: 2/5
Overall: 2.5 out of 5
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