THE MORNING LIST
For this month of December, the columnists of “Le Monde” have selected seventeen books for you to put in the hands of your children. Story, imagination, search and find… there is choice, and it's happy, before the end of year celebrations.
- “If you exhaust all your words”: tender story
A certain number of adults may recognize themselves in the first double page. A little girl, in her bed, asks her father who is sitting next to her but absorbed in his phone: “If you use up all your words, will you have enough left for me? ». No doubt feeling at fault, the father racks his brains to come up with an imaginative response, involving elves, word factories, infinity bottles and a giant owl. The abundant and colorful illustrations live up to this tender story. EvB
From Felicita Room. The Watermelon, 48 p., 17 €. Since 4 years.
- “When I remain silent”: what lives in us and escapes us
In Bulgarian, there are two words for silence. One means “absence of noise” and the other “absence of speech, words”. In this black and white album, it is about words, and what they cannot say. A bear recounts his discovery of language and its limits, in a few pages, in a few sentences. “I know that words should make me stronger, but sometimes I am afraid of hiding something important in them that I will never find again”he said. A poetic definition of what lives in us and escapes us. C. Ge.
By Zornitsa Hristova and Kiril Zlatkov, translated from Bulgarian by Marie Vrinat-Nikolov. Six sour lemons, 32 p., €18. From 3 years old.
- “This is not a shoe”: colorful picture book
Mischievously diverting the title of a famous painting by René Magritte (1898-1967), this picture book rich in complementary colors declines the principle of the catalog through around fifty everyday objects and familiar animals and plants. “This is not ice cream” – understand “not just” ice cream – we can read in front of a sample of sundaes, banana splits, eskimo and other milkshakes. This is not (only) pants, but also overalls, cargo, jeans, leggings… As graphic as it is lexical, the exercise is not devoid of a certain poetry. The opportunity to learn that a conifer is called the “despair of monkeys » and that a “devil’s claw” belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family. F.P.
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