From Cover to Cover (3 page)

Source notes
: In nonfiction,
source notes,
or
references,
provide readers with a record of the original sources the author consulted while
researching the topic. Source notes are usually listed chapter by chapter, in the order in which the information is cited in the text. Authors sometimes include a sentence or two that gives readers insight into the research process used and how decisions were made when sources conflicted with each other.

Bibliography
: The original sources consulted by the author are generally listed alphabetically by the author in a bibliography. In books for the young, authors sometimes provide “Books for Further Reading,” a list of books on the subject that are written at roughly the same age level as the book in hand.

Index
: An alphabetical list of topics and/or names that appear in the body of the book, accompanied by the page numbers on which the items can be found.

Bio
: Biographical information about the author sometimes appears on the last page of the book. This may be a restatement of the back flap bio, or it may be an expanded version.

CATEGORIES OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS

We typically categorize children’s books in two ways: by
age level
and by
genre
, or type. Juvenile trade publishing produces books for all ages of children, from babies up through the teen years. The age level of the intended audience generally dictates both form and content.

Nonfiction
, or books of information as they are often called, is published for all ages. But two books on the same topic, even written by the same author, will be very different from each other if one is aimed at three-year-olds and the other is written for children from ages eight to ten. It stands to reason that a book on human reproduction published for preschoolers will differ greatly from a book on the same subject published for adolescents. The age level of the intended audience may also dictate subject matter. A book on going to day care would obviously
be for preschoolers, and a book on the history of the Negro Baseball Leagues, for older readers.

Folklore
and
poetry
are also published for all ages of children. As with nonfiction, both style and content will differ according to the age levels of the intended audience. Many picture-book editions of single folktales are published every year, some for children as young as two or three and some for children as old as eight or nine. Collections of folktales and other kinds of traditional literature, such as mythology, tall tales, and epic literature, are generally aimed at school-age children. Young children, who respond naturally to rhythm and rhyme, are a receptive audience for nursery rhymes and humorous verse, the early roots of poetry. Older children enjoy humorous verse as well, in addition to more sophisticated forms of true poetry, some of which is especially written for children and some selected from poetry written for adults.

In the area of
fiction
, we get a clearer breakdown by age level, as specific forms of fiction have been created to meet the unique needs and interests of children at various ages.
Picture books
have been especially developed as an art form with young children in mind. These thirty-two-page creations ingeniously combine words and pictures to tell stories preschoolers want to hear again and again.
Easy readers
are the next step up from picture books. They are consciously created to help build the skills of children who are just learning to read.
Transitional books
move up one step more to serve as a bridge between easy readers and children’s novels, often called
chapter books
. At all levels, children’s fiction covers a range of subjects, themes, and styles and represents some of the best writing we find in the world of literature today.

In the upcoming chapters, we will take a closer look at all these categories. Each one merits special consideration and requires a slightly different approach. Since this book is intended for people who are new to the field of children’s books, I will provide a brief history of the different
types of children’s books as they have developed in U.S. trade publishing so that you can get a sense of how these books came to be. In discussing critical standards, I will use examples from well-known and easily available books that also represent some of the best books of their type. I recommend that you seek out any of these books that you don’t know so that you can read them to build your familiarity with the literature.

Throughout the book, I will suggest questions you can ask yourself as you go on to evaluate books on your own. These questions are intended not as a test but to help you begin to make concrete critical judgments about what you are reading. Some of the questions may already seem obvious to you. If so, that’s good! You are well on your way to being a critical reader and a responsible reviewer. As you gain experience with book evaluation, these sorts of questions will become second nature to you.

Finally, there is no substitute for reading widely yourself. The more experience you have as a reader of children’s books, the easier it will be for you to think about the one you have just read. One of the most important skills you can acquire is the ability to place a book in an appropriate context. How does it measure up against others of its type?
Are
there, in fact, others of its type? Or is this something fresh and new? One of the greatest thrills for a children’s book reviewer is to find the book that is truly innovative and groundbreaking, or completely satisfying and close to perfect. That’s what keeps us all reading.

Nonfiction is an essential part of every child’s library, whether the child reads it for specific information, recreation, or both. Many children prefer to read nonfiction exclusively, and they may voraciously read every children’s book a library owns on the subject of horses or ancient Egypt or basketball. Young readers sometimes go through phases during which they will read only biographies, for example, or books about dinosaurs. Some children like to browse through highly visual books of information, pausing to read captions and perhaps a bit of corresponding text when a picture grabs their attention. Others trek to the library, looking for books on a particular topic they have been assigned to report on at school. Whatever their motivation for reading nonfiction, children deserve to have books of information that are accurate, engaging, and well written.

The past few decades have seen great changes in children’s nonfiction, many of which may be traced to the mid-1980s. Nonfiction languished throughout the 1970s, due to cuts in federal funding that previously had supported school library purchases of nonfiction (science in particular), then made a comeback after several titles were cited as Newbery Honor Books. The impact of the Newbery Medal cannot be
underestimated in contemporary children’s literature published in the United States. Because the Newbery Medal has a tremendous impact on sales, it continues to set the standard for excellence in children’s books. It also seems to have an impact on what sorts of books get published. Unfortunately, the Newbery Committee rarely honors nonfiction, a fact that was brought to the public’s attention in 1976 by Milton Meltzer’s widely read
Horn Book
essay, “Where Do All the Prizes Go?: The Case for Nonfiction.”

Although the Newbery Committee had recognized nonfiction prior to this time—in fact, the first Newbery was awarded in 1922 to a nonfiction book,
The Story of Mankind
, by Hendrik Willem van Loon—it was not until the mid-1980s that the honors came more frequently. In 1984,
Sugaring Time
, by Kathryn Lasky with photographs by Christopher G. Knight, won a Newbery Honor. In 1986 the Newbery Committee named Rhoda Blumberg’s
Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun
as an Honor Book; and in 1987, a science book,
Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens
, by Patricia Lauber, was cited as such. Finally in 1988 the Newbery Medal was awarded to a nonfiction book for the first time in more than thirty years—to Russell Freedman’s
Lincoln: A Photobiography
.

While there has always been excellent nonfiction published for children, these four books stood out not only for their distinguished writing but also for their eye-catching presentations.
Volcano
, for example, was one of the first photo-essays to use color photographs. Today, it would be hard to find a children’s photo-essay that didn’t.
Lincoln
was generously illustrated, so much so that the word “photobiography” was used to call attention to this fact in the book’s subtitle, lest potential readers dismiss the book as just another dull, thick black-and-white biography. Since 1988, there have been many biographies for children that imitate
the look of Freedman’s book by using dozens of photographs to illustrate the text.

All these books stand out as examples representing two forces at work: the American population, including both children and adults, was being seen as more visually oriented—that is, more responsive to pictures than printed words—and changes in technology allowed publishers to cater to this belief. Almost overnight we began to see newspapers and magazines decrease the number of printed words and increase the numbers of illustrations. In publications for children, this trend had the biggest impact on nonfiction. We began to see books of information that relied more on illustration, with many book creators successfully using unconventional approaches in presenting information to children. The books in Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen’s innovative series the Magic School Bus were pioneers in this area. Their trademark style of combining fact and fiction, using multiple strands of narrative and healthy doses of humor, has been widely imitated in books of information.

The 1980s also saw a change in attitudes toward fictionalization in children’s nonfiction. In earlier decades, it was considered perfectly acceptable for authors writing biographies to invent scenes and dialogue. But biographer Jean Fritz set a new standard for children’s nonfiction writers with her highly acclaimed biographies for young readers: Fritz didn’t include dialogue unless she could document that her subject had actually said it, showing that it was possible to write lively, engaging biographies without fictionalization. “I don’t make up facts, but at the same time I have no desire to write in a factual style,” Fritz wrote about her work in 1988. “Nonfiction can be told in a narrative voice and still maintain integrity. The art of fiction is making up facts; the art of nonfiction is using facts to make up a form.”

Another change introduced at around the same time was that
nonfiction was now being aimed at younger and younger children. Books of information are regularly published for preschoolers, some for children as young as two years old. This suggests a conscious move away from the idea that nonfiction books are mostly “homework” books. Interestingly, some small children, like their older peers, show a definite preference for books of information or “books with real stuff,” as they call them. Others just as happily accept both kinds of books, if their adults are open-minded enough to offer them nonfiction as well as storybooks. And a lot of books of information for preschoolers serve a dual purpose and function as a bridge between adult and child, informing two generations simultaneously.
A Baby’s Coming to Your House!
, by Shelley Moore Thomas, with photographs by Eric Futran, provides young children with basic information about what it’s like to live with a newborn, while it also lets parents know what sorts of concerns and questions older preschoolage siblings are likely to have.

Since 1988, there have been a handful of nonfiction Newbery Honor Books, including three more highly visual biographies by Russell Freedman. But, as Jonathan Hunt points out in reassessment of the nonfiction landscape in “Where Do All the Prizes Go?: Thoughts on the State of Informational Books,” thirty years after Meltzer’s article first appeared, nonfiction still appears to be a neglected genre, as far as the Newbery Medal is concerned. That does not appear to be the case with the Caldecott; in the same time period, there have been three Caldecott Medal winners that are categorized as nonfiction:
Snowflake Bentley
, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, illustrated by Mary Azarian;
So You Want to Be President
, by Judith St. George, illustrated by David Small; and
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers
, by Mordicai Gerstein, as well as several that were Caldecott Honor Books. Hunt attributes this to the fact that we are living in a “golden age of informational picture books.” He also traces the problem to the criteria the
Newbery Committee must use that does not allow them to consider illustrations unless they detract from the text. For children’s nonfiction, which today relies heavily on illustration as well as text to get information across, this would cause the committee to rule out most of the outstanding books of information.

Perhaps with these sorts of concerns in mind, the Association for Library Service to Children responsible for overseeing the Newbery and Caldecott awards established a new award for nonfiction in 2001 called the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal. In selecting the winning books each year, the committee considers both text and illustrations, in recognition of the importance of the visual elements in nonfiction books. This award, along with the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, established by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1990, gave greater visibility to the genre overall and raised the standards of excellence in children’s informational books.

With all the variety in approach and content found in these books of information—not to mention the needs, abilities, and interests of the young readers themselves—there are still critical standards that can be applied across the board in the evaluation of children’s nonfiction. You need not be a subject specialist yourself (though it helps!) to evaluate them, but you do need to be a careful and critical reader. Approach the book with a questioning mind as you think about its accuracy, organization, illustrations, design, prose, and documentation.

AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE AUTHOR

The first question to ask yourself as you approach a book of information is: Who is the author? It may be a name you know and recognize as a reputable writer of information books for children, or it may be a name you have never seen before.

Check for an author bio at the back of the book or on the back flap
to try to determine what sort of authority the author has. You might recognize the name Sid Fleischman as a writer of children’s novels, for example, but until you read the flap copy of
Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini
, you might not know that he was trained as a magician, a fact that gives him special insight into the subject of his book. Biographical information often reveals that an author has an educational background related to the subject about which he or she is writing. This is not to say that an author
must
have formal education in a particular field in order to write about it; it is merely the first step the responsible critic takes in a systematic evaluation of a book’s accuracy. By the same token, you must not assume that an author’s subject expertise guarantees success in writing for children, even if he or she has written outstanding children’s nonfiction in the past. Again, an assessment of the author’s authority is just one piece of critical information you may use in building your evaluation of a book.

Check the acknowledgments next to see if the author has cited the name of a content specialist who read the manuscript for accuracy. This is an especially important step for writers who do not have a background in the subject about which they are writing, and even those who do often wisely seek the informed opinion of another expert. The children’s nonfiction writer often walks a fine line between making a subject comprehensible to children and simplifying to the point of inaccuracy. A content specialist can call an author’s attention to areas in which he or she is in danger of having crossed into the realm of inaccuracy. Beyond assuring accuracy, the acknowledgment of expert advice shows that the author respects young readers and believes it is important that they have access to accurate information.

Another indication that the nonfiction writer respects the needs of young readers is the use of inclusive language and illustrations. By this we mean that boys
and
girls of all racial backgrounds should feel included,
rather than excluded, from the social life of the book. Both text and illustrations should show a realistic diversity of different types of people. An excellent example of how an author’s or illustrator’s responsible choices in this area enhance the material is
Hominids: A Look Back at Our Ancestors
, by Helen Roney Sattler, illustrated by Christopher Santoro. Both the author and illustrator have avoided the white male bias that has been prevalent in studies of human evolution for decades simply by taking a broader—and more realistic—view of the human family. Beginning with the use of the anthropologically accurate term “hominid” instead of the popular term “early man,” Sattler is careful to use language that specifies gender only when gender is significant in her discussion (the height of a female
Australopithecus afarensis
versus that of her male counterpart). Similarly, Santoro’s black-and-white line drawings show males and females in equal number; and when drawing comparisons between ancient hominids and contemporary humans, people of all races are shown as the norm.

Of course, there will be instances in nonfiction when the subject matter dictates that only one race or gender be represented. One would not expect to see women gratuitously included, for example, among the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence nor would one expect to see Norwegians present during the construction of the Great Wall of China. But the vast majority of topics covered in the field of children’s nonfiction can be approached with a wide vision. There is no excuse in this day and age for a children’s book of science experiments, for example, to show only white boys with test tubes.

ORGANIZATION

The way in which information is organized in books for young readers is of the utmost importance. A good nonfiction book arranges material in a logical sequence. The two most common organizational patterns in books
of information for children are
enumeration
and
chronological order
.

In enumeration the author describes the relevant parts of a subject in some sort of orderly fashion.
Little Lions, Bull Baiters & Hunting Hounds: A History of Dog Breeds,
by Jeff Crosby and Shelley Ann Jackson, describes forty-three different dog breeds that are arranged in four broad categories: hunting breeds, herding breeds, working breeds, and companion breeds. Within each broad category there are subcategories. Hunting breeds, for example, includes sight hounds, scent hounds, sporting breeds, and terriers.

Chronological order is the obvious pattern for history or biography, but not all books using chronological order follow a straight line from past to present. In
Who Was First? Discovering the Americas
, Russell Freedman uses reverse chronological order, beginning with Christopher Columbus and moving back through time to explore accounts of Chinese travelers in the early 1400s to Leif Eriksson in 1000
A.D
. to archaeological evidence of human activity in Brazil dating back 50,000 years. Freedman’s approach gives young readers a sense of historical method, and that scientific theories are not always in agreement. Karen Levine combines two alternating chronologies in
Hana’s Suitcase
. The first gives an account of a Holocaust museum curator in Tokyo who from 2000 to 2001 worked to track down the owner of a child’s suitcase that had been donated to them by the Auschwitz Museum. The second traces the short life of the suitcase’s owner, Hana Brady, a Jewish child who had lived during the Holocaust. Each of the alternating narratives provides a dramatic tension for the other until they converge with the revelation that Hana did not survive but that her brother did and was still alive.