Read En famille in Frenchwith every sentence explained

En famille by Hector Malot was first published in 1893. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children and young adult. It runs to about 99,100 words.

Alone in the world at twelve, Perrine has one hope left: a grandfather who has never wanted to know her.

One hot June afternoon, a battered photographer's wagon pulled by a donkey named Palikare waits at the gates of Paris, after a long journey across half of Europe. Inside lies a young mother, gravely ill. Beside it stands her daughter Perrine, eleven or twelve years old, penniless but proud.

Soon Perrine must set out on foot, alone, for Maraucourt in Picardy, where her grandfather, the rich and powerful Vulfran Paindavoine, rules over vast factories that employ the whole region. Long ago he cut off her father. Hungry, exhausted and determined, Perrine must find a way into the old man's world without revealing who she is.

Hector Malot's moving companion to Nobody's Boy (Sans famille) is a story of courage and resourcefulness, famously adapted as the Japanese anime Perrine Monogatari.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of French and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.