Read Poil de Carotte in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Poil de Carotte by Jules Renard was first published in 1894. In Passage you read the full text in the original French, marked beginner and filed under children and young adult. It runs to about 32,800 words.

Red hair, freckles, and a mother who never misses a chance to punish him.

Everyone in the Lepic family calls the youngest son "Carrot Top", even his parents. His older brother Félix is spoiled, his sister Ernestine is favoured, his father is distant and silent, and Madame Lepic seems to save all her coldness for him. Carrot Top is sent to shut the hens in the dark, blamed for every broken thing and mocked at every meal.

Yet he is no saint himself. Clever, stubborn, sometimes cruel and often very funny, he finds his own small ways to survive, to rebel and to hope for a little affection. His life unfolds in short, sharp scenes, some comic, some heartbreaking, a few written like little plays.

Carrot Top is Jules Renard's classic portrait of an unhappy childhood, drawn from his own. Renard turned it into a successful play, and Julien Duvivier's 1932 film made it unforgettable.

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.