France, apparently. At least not good ones:
At their worst, French children’s stories are moralistic and heavy-handed, and even at their best, they are often old-fashioned. Many employ the passé simple, a tense too formal for speech, and the type is frequently very small. Engaging narrative tends to be sacrificed to the visual aspect, as though books were purely vehicles for illustrators. In short, French children’s books seem aimed more at adults than children.
Some reasons for the disparity:
“The aim of French books”, says Gilliane Quinn, a Paris-based Irish mother of bilingual children, “is often to get across a moral or an educational perspective. The stories don’t usually have a happy ending like English ones do. Chapters of ‘Les Malheurs de Sophie’, for example [Victorian tales of a little girl’s mischief, published 1858], always end horrifically, with the mother dying, the boat sinking, the horrible stepmother or the child being beaten as punishment for a prank. English or American stories wouldn’t leave their audience in such emotional despair, and yet ‘Les Malheurs’ are one of the big successes of French literature.” An American edition of “Babar”, incidentally, omits the opening scene, in which young Babar’s mother is gruesomely killed by poachers…
As for the lack of fun in the writing, could it be that French, with many words ending in a silent “e”, and a relatively small vocabulary (it is said to contain a fifth as many words as English), is less conducive to rhyme and puns and onomatopoeia?
The Dish 