I have a daughter in elementary school, a French school in Paris, the city that I call home.

My daughter and her schoolmates read books, then write book reports on the books they have read. They started doing this at the beginning of the school year, and read several books throughout the school year (and during school vacations).

Everyone in my daughter’s class –the fifth grade– writes their book report in French. The books they read are all in French. But the books they read are translations, books originally written in a language other than French.

“All the books are translations?” I asked my daughter, doubtfully. She assured me that this was so. Most students read books originally written in English (or in “American”: French translators distinguish the two). Occasionally a student reads a book originally written in a more exotic language, such as Russian.

I solicited my daughter’s support to monitor her class’ reading habits. Surely, I thought, they’ll get around to reading books in French, originally written in French.

Six months later, my daughter’s assessment remains unchanged: all the students, without exception, have read books translated into French from another language.

My daughter is partial to an English series about young spies. Her classmates seem to have diverse and wide-ranging tastes. The class is not under the sway of any particular author or genre.

There are plenty of publishes in France that offer “senior child” or young adult titles. There is also, in France, a generations-old program to subsidize publications for youth. Of course, there are French authors who write for younger readers.

Why does this supply not encounter greater demand? Why do French consumers, when offered a choice, choose foreign over French writers? I have two hypotheses:

  • First, foreign writers have already proven their success in a home market. Put differently, French publishers (only) translate titles that have sold (well) elsewhere. A kind of natural selection pits proven foreign writers against a broader range of French writers. This might explain a bias or skew towards writers translated into French, but not why young people would read only these writers.
  • Second, foreign authors write in ways that French authors don’t. I don’t know whether literary critics have looked into this –how writers for young people write– but I think it’s a promising avenue for research. Although French writers write stories set in the past or in fantasy other-worlds, I find them thinly imagined, at least compared to English-language works. And French fiction in a realist vein tends, in my view, towards preachy and didactic works that unduly constrain their protagonists (and the imaginations of their readers).