France

Materials from France

The Race

Get ready, get set, GO! A group of caribou gather together to run a race. Starting at the beginning of the course, readers join in the fun as the caribou engage in some rather outlandish tricks in order to be the first to cross the finish line. (Banana skins, for example, are an effective way to get rid of some opponents.) But in the midst of this titanic struggle for victory, some of the caribou stop to question the merits of their single-minded pursuit of winning at all costs. In the end, the reader is left to decide who the real winner is in this cautionary tale about the ups and downs of winning and losing. Illustrations are cut-paper collage.

How Does My Garden Grow?

Sophie lives in the city, and her vegetables come from the supermarket. Then she goes to visit her grandparents in the countryside — and soon discovers how much there is to learn about how things grow! Sophie helps her grandfather through the different seasons, finding out about mulching onions, eating flowers, weeding, bees, making salad, catching beetles, digging, earthing up, picking and composting. When winter comes, Sophie has to go home — but her grandfather has one last surprise for her.

City Cat

A plucky stray cat takes a Grand Tour in Kate Banks’ story of a family on a European vacation. As the family travels from one city to the next, the cat finds its own means–by bus, boat, train, truck, and bike–to tag along on the trip, visiting historic landmarks like Buckingham Palace and the Cathedral of Notre Dame along the way. Readers will pore over the spreads to find where City Cat is hiding in each city, and detailed backmatter explains the history behind the sites in each locale.

Help! We Need A Title!

What if you picked out a book to read, but the characters weren’t ready for you yet

Take a peek inside this book and you’ll find some characters (though they’re still a bit sketchy). They’ll be perplexed to see you, so they’ll quickly try to track down their author (who has a lot more work to do). What you won’t find is a story, or a title, because — guess what? The book isn’t finished yet! But surely the author must have a story to tell? In this charming “meta” picture book, children of all ages are encouraged to interact with a book still in the process of being invented. And that’s a story in itself!

The Pilot and the Little Prince

This story is the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of Little Prince. He was born in France in 1900, when airplanes were just being invented. Antoine dreamed of flying and grew up to be a pilot—and that was when his adventures began. He found a job delivering mail by plane, which had never been done before. He and his fellow pilots traveled to faraway places and discovered new ways of getting from one place to the next. Antoine flew over mountains and deserts. He battled winds and storms. He tried to break aviation records, and sometimes he even crashed. From his plane, Antoine looked down on the earth and was inspired to write about his life and his pilot-hero friends in memoirs and in fiction. Peter Sís’s remarkable biography celebrates the author of The Little Prince, one of the most beloved books in the world.