Customer Reviews

From Cover to Cover: Evaluating and Reviewing Children's Books

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is should be an essential for anyone writing for children. Horning covers all the genres, offering insight into pacing, character and plot. She better defines what makes a picture book, an early reader, a chapter book, a mid-grade and a young adult -- definitions that are often murky in writing books. Although this book may have been intended for librarians and others in the book industry, I recommend it highly for anyone contemplating writing for children.

I get paid for writing reviews of children's books. Most of the books that I'm asked to review are art instruction books or picture books because I also am a freelance artist. I thought that I should read this book to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. However, the title is misleading. It is not really a book about "Evaluating and Reviewing Children's Books". A better title would be understanding children's books. Only the last chapter in the book deals with reviewing children's books and that is the shortest chapter. Most of the book is comprised of a comprehensive overview of the different categories of children's books (non-fiction, poetry, picture, easy readers, transitional and fiction). If I had the opportunity to browse through this book in a regular bookstore, it would have stayed on the shelf.

First let me say that this is a good book, I am glad that I purchased it. It codifies many of the characteristics of a quality children's book, and helps writers and reviewers exercise better critical judgment.

However, the author sometimes "puts a bit too fine a point on it," as a Brit might say. There is a section on the layout of early readers and transitional books which describes a specific target number of words per line, lines per page, text size, etc. I found this section quite helpful overall, and I specified changes to our style guide after reading it. But as useful as this material is, I felt the author's attempt to distinguish numbers of words per line between level 1, level 2 and level 3 early reader books was taking the process a bit too far.

Overall, this is a minor issue. As other reviewers have mentioned, writers will find value in the detailed descriptions of how children learn to read, how they react to themes, styles and plots (and how to recognize weakness in each), and how to target different age groups. Indeed, this is the only book I have found with detailed and usable information on these points.

Summary: Buy it if you are a creator or reviewer of children's books.

I really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did, because I have a great deal of respect for the author's knowledge of her subject matter. However, I was disappointed because so much of what she has to say seems to be a summary of basic knowledge about children's books. My main problem with this book is that I don't know who the audience is. Do people who want to know how to evaluate children's books really need to be told what alliteration, assonance, and consonance are in the chapter on poetry, for example? As I read this book, I did not feel that the author was addressing me in any way: I don't know who she was addressing. Writers? Parents? Professors of children's literature? College students? Librarians? I was disappointed.

This book is a required text for a children's litreture course that I am doing. It is written in a way that is easy to relate to. Teachers of young children will find this a very useful reference allowing them to organize their classroom libraries. After reading this book I have gained the critical skills to review children's books.

This book was very helpful in my web class assignment, and I will keep it in my collection forever.

As I read this book, somehow the song on the train with all the little busy bodies early on in the musical "The Music Man" started to play increasingly loudly in my mind. While, many of the factual statements Horning makes are substantively correct, her tone as well as her use of those facts constitute what to this reader, at least, is what is most wrong with so many books published for children today.

Underneath Horning's considerable knowledge of books for children, is a cookie cutter set of criteria for what she prescribes as acceptable that in many cases have little to do with the quality of the book. A case in point is her laying out of 5 types of source notes from "model" at the top of her scale to background and nonexistent at the bottom accompanying folktales and fairystories. She rules the bottom two unacceptable. Under this procrustean bed, Shakespeare and Joyce would have no hope. While having this information ready at hand might be convenient, it does not change the merits of the actual story content at all. As a young reader, doing my own research into the backgrounds of tales led me into the world of scholarship and research. Having it spoonfed as Horning demands might be nice, but also forestalls the reader taking action inspired by the story. Making it a requirement as Horning does has no merit.

Later, for those who have the temerity to write an original story in the folktale genre, she actually cautions the would be evaluator to "be on the look out" and go so far as to recommend checking the Library of Congress CIP and Dewey decimal number assignment to see if the author is lying about telling an original story. Hornig even notes that even these are "not always infallible." Cheep cheep cheep!

Her prescriptions on illustrations are no less condescending, snide, and nitpicking. She describes a fracas amongst librarians over two visual depictions of African tales that had the impudent gall to use illustration that interprets the culture that the stories came from rather than meticulously, slavishly reproducing that culture on the page. She does not provide any detail of the complaints making her prescription on illustration a blanket one, either slavish reproduction or none at all. The Disney production of Lion King would not pass her test. Why bother with art and proclaim only photographs should be used in books for children?

Under the section for picture books, she asks derisively who has not had the experience of a child wanting a page finished before the reader has finished reading the page. At this point, I found myself wanting to turn the page before she was finished. In fact, I only perfunctorily finished the book so that I could honestly say I'd read it. The majority of the book is an enumeration of the basic parts of writing and illustration that any high school graduate would be familiar with. A good language arts teacher would be a much better source to learn to appreciate and enjoy what makes for good reading material than Hornig's narrow, shallow, and somewhat sanctimonious, dry list.

When I looked up the song now annoyingly loud in my ears to quote for this review, I found the opening lyrics to be about book evaluation and close here with those lines:

Professor, her kind of woman doesn't belong on any committee.

Of course, I shouldn't tell you this but she advocates dirty books.

Dirty books!

Chaucer!

Rabelais!

Balzac!

They refer to the librarian who goes against popular views and looks generously but not not without discerning at works for their merit. Horning is the chorus of upstanding custodians of children's literature who go all the while in the background Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, Cheep cheep cheep!

I would add here Chandler Harris who wrote the Br'er Rabbit stories, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or more recently, Harry Potter and Susan Patron's "The Higher Power of Lucky". Horning is supposedly on the committee that nominated these last two. I find a hard time seeing these as acceptable by the standards she prescribes here. I'm all for having standards and looked to this book by an author clearly having the authority worth listening to for her views on what those standards might be. This book, though, by an author who can divide all lines into just two kinds, straight and curved, I take a fat black marker and make a definitive stroke of a straight one marking this one out, definitely No!

The book isn't really all that interesting. Some of the good aspects are that the print is big, and it is easy reading. You can knock a chapter or two out of the way in an hour easily.