Aloyse wrote: J'approuve! Pour info les bibliothèques de quartier avaient toute la collection des fantômettes dans les années 80.
Merci Aloyse! There is I note also a modern French animated series ... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6KFhT ... Fc02t7zUag Like Le Petit Nicolas there a best friend whose only notable trait is they are fat and they are always eating. If you modernised that, there's no reason imho Fantômette couldn't be a fun contemporary heroine. Like I said it was a similar level to the Nancy Drews but much more fun, so strike one on the French column vs American.
I finished (sort of) Notes sur l'affaire Dominici suivi d' Essai sur le caractère des personnages by Jean Gioni. I read it because I read it was like a French In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, maybe my favourite ever book. I posted about it in the French Reading Resources thread saying it was quite easy to read at my B1 level but I jumped the gun a bit. The first 60% which is Giono's impressions of the trial are indeed straightforward. Once I finished I was thinking it wasn't actually much like In Cold Blood, except that it was a nonfiction account by a novelist of a 50s/60s rural murder. But you notice the "suivi d'" part of the title above because this was actually two books. The first 60% of his writing about the trial and the final third which is his much more literary and dense history of the region (Haut Provence), the psychological character of the farmers there, the economy, its history over hundreds of years during the wars of religion (whole villages of nothing but Protestants!!) and so on and so forth.
Basically my take away was that this region is a Deliverance-style backwater than no sophisticated city dwellers could possible understand.
So yes, if you took this section and cut it up and spliced it throughout the trial passages, it would be very much like In Cold Blood actually (though published years before). But personally I found this last section much too hard to read comfortably and I skimmed it a bit. First 60% = B1. Last 30% = C1 imho. I am still super interested in it though I intend to revisit at the end of the year as a gauge of my progress.
One big difference is that In Cold Blood paints a vivid picture of the victims and Giono, while expressing the appropriate horror at the crimes, frankly couldn't care less about them. The (English) adult victims were a Sir and a Lady which would be enough for most people to elevate their story as a spicy context but to Giono this is a story of French people and French society and French geography and French history and France and the non-French victims just randomly intersected with French people and so aren't part of the story.