A sort of encyclopedia, with entries, each about two pages long, on genres and (mostly) artists and illustrators arranged alphabetically. Good as far as it goes, but can't convey much information in two pages (I have full books about many of the authors covered here) and can't achieve anything near adequacy, let alone completeness, in 300 pages. I have a book more than twice this size merely listing award winning books and their authors. The book has a strong American bias, covering the Caldecott and Newbery awards but not the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie awards; and despite being published in Canada in 1984, does not cover then-emerging authors like Gordon Korman and Robert Munsch, who were both already highly popular and important authors, having published some of their best work by 1980. And yet Dennis Lee gets in - even in 1984 one could tell he lacks the staying power of these two indefatigable stalwarts. The book is highly inconsistent in its approach to literature in translation. I could understand omitting important authors like Tove Jansson (Moomins) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking) if it was a hard and fast rule that only authors writing in English would be included, but random entries on de Brunhoff (Babar), Collodi, and others leave me wondering what the criteria actually were. Authors from the USA and Britain, and from Canada, are found here. There were, however, no writers from Australia or New Zealand that I could find. Margaret Mahy's name leapt to mind, and she was already a Carnegie winner (1982) and author of a Greenaway medal book (1969) as well as other awards, but is not found here. And leaving out Holling Clancy Holling, who was American, is inexplicable.

I think this book, although subtitled "A Guide for Parents and Teachers", is actually more suitable for students in a course on children's literature who need to be able to look up specific people and topics in a reference book to supplement their professor's lecture. Especially if their lecturer was Professor Stott, because my own professor of children's literature at University of Wisconsin would have chosen different authors and topics for inclusion. ( )