Arthea J. S. Reed

I am a teacher, writer and publisher and collector of books for young children. I have been searching for good reference guides about books for children. For the most part, I have been disappointed by parent reference guides. They have been unhelpful, not well-annotated or organized. Also, some of the reference guides are way too big; a shorter and better annotated book is more practical. Now obviously the web is replete with listicles -- some are good -- but I personally find this to be the most useful reference. It's especially good for breaking down books into genres and in describing the special reading challenges for each age group. (The author is an education professor). There's a considerable discussion of why some kids don't glom onto reading, which I found interesting. Sure, the book recommendations are old -- the book was published in 1994, but on the bright side, used books can be bought these days for practically nothing. Here are some things which I would have liked to see in the guide: a list of all the awards, and the award winners (we have wikipedia of course, but sometimes it's helpful to have it in book form). Second, I really didn't see much coverage of either history books or history-themed books for younger readers. I recently compiled an online biliography of Civil War fiction (just google my name and "Civil War fiction" and you'll get it). For it I found a remarkable variety of juvenile fiction about that time period, and kids need a little nudging to learn about. Obviously since the mid-1990s, the "graphic novel" format has become very popular even for nonfiction, and this book couldn't hope to address that trend. Finally, the book doesn't have an index -- that's inconvenient -- but that compels one to browse through it. To summarize: This book focuses more on strategies for a parent to persuade his or her child to read, but it also contains a nice (but not comprehensive) annotated bibliography of books by genre.… (meer)