Merlin : L'école des druides - Laurence Carrière
Le plus grand sorcier de tous les temps naît au pays de Galles d'une belle druidesse des descendance royale et d'un père inconnu. À l'aube de ses quatorze ans - l'âge de la majorité à l'époque romaine -, le jeune Merlin se retrouve à cheval entre deux univers et doit choisir entre la vocation de druide et celle de guerrier.
Jamais trop loin de son amie, la mystérieuse fée Ninianne (la future dame du Lac), Merlin, qui est doté de pouvoirs extraordinaires qu'il apprend tout juste à maîtriser, voyage aux quatre cains du royaume et au-delà, accompagné du chevalier Galegantin et de sa fidèle troupe de guerriers. Son apprentissage, les missions qu'on lui confie et les défis qu'il doit relever forgeront celui qui sera appelé à devenir le conseiller du grand unificateur, le Haut-Roi de toute la Bretagne.
So. First French I've really read since university. I picked a teen book so I could kind of ease into it. Didn't have too much trouble with it, but I do sort of wish it had been a better book. As it was, it was book 1 in a fantasy series, so it suffered from all the problems that generally entails. Specifically, it started out fairly aimlessly, just introducing the characters, and their setting, and the general sense of things in this world. Only halfway through or so do things start to come together to form the beginnings of any actual story arc. At that point it started to get at least vaguely interesting, but not so much so that when it stopped, I was desperate to get my hands on book 2. And actually, the way it ended kind of makes me like it a little more. There are plenty of loose ends to be tied up in future books and everything, but you're not left right at the moment where the main character is just about to be dropped into a pit of boiling oil populated by some kind of super oil-resistant hungry crocodiles.
Anyway, I think I need to learn a little more about the verb tensed used for most of the narration, because it's not one you really deal with much in French classes, but it could come up in translating, I suppose, so perhaps I should figure it out. Aside from that, I had to look up a few words, but most of them meant what I figured they probably did based on context, so that went well. Don't really have much else to say about this book. I wouldn't likely have picked it up at all in English, and might not have bothered to finish it if I did, but for a teaching exercise for myself, it did what I needed it to do.
Next up: Book 1 of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew, I think?), by CS Lewis
Jamais trop loin de son amie, la mystérieuse fée Ninianne (la future dame du Lac), Merlin, qui est doté de pouvoirs extraordinaires qu'il apprend tout juste à maîtriser, voyage aux quatre cains du royaume et au-delà, accompagné du chevalier Galegantin et de sa fidèle troupe de guerriers. Son apprentissage, les missions qu'on lui confie et les défis qu'il doit relever forgeront celui qui sera appelé à devenir le conseiller du grand unificateur, le Haut-Roi de toute la Bretagne.
So. First French I've really read since university. I picked a teen book so I could kind of ease into it. Didn't have too much trouble with it, but I do sort of wish it had been a better book. As it was, it was book 1 in a fantasy series, so it suffered from all the problems that generally entails. Specifically, it started out fairly aimlessly, just introducing the characters, and their setting, and the general sense of things in this world. Only halfway through or so do things start to come together to form the beginnings of any actual story arc. At that point it started to get at least vaguely interesting, but not so much so that when it stopped, I was desperate to get my hands on book 2. And actually, the way it ended kind of makes me like it a little more. There are plenty of loose ends to be tied up in future books and everything, but you're not left right at the moment where the main character is just about to be dropped into a pit of boiling oil populated by some kind of super oil-resistant hungry crocodiles.
Anyway, I think I need to learn a little more about the verb tensed used for most of the narration, because it's not one you really deal with much in French classes, but it could come up in translating, I suppose, so perhaps I should figure it out. Aside from that, I had to look up a few words, but most of them meant what I figured they probably did based on context, so that went well. Don't really have much else to say about this book. I wouldn't likely have picked it up at all in English, and might not have bothered to finish it if I did, but for a teaching exercise for myself, it did what I needed it to do.
Next up: Book 1 of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew, I think?), by CS Lewis