From: Susan Lempke <slempke>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 09:57:36 -0500

them about this. <<

All right, I'll bite! True, children probably do not read the notes at the back of a book, but I think it's essential that they be there. The relative popularity of the book doesn't matter to me at all--it all needs to be documented. As a reviewer, I'm sure I don't look at this in the kind of detail the Sibert Committee does, where they may check to see that each piece of information is accounted for. In general, I am looking for signs that the author has done the research and isn't making assumptions.

I wonder if this isn't handled quite differently in the adult publishing world. In children's nonfiction, the breakdown isn't between scholarly and popular--it is between report books and quality nonfiction. We associate footnotes with being scholarly, but children's nonfiction publishing has to overcome a bad history of making the books entertaining at the expense of being factual.

By the way, when I did a quick check of which libraries in our consortium of 21 have Childhood of Famous Americans books (the notoriously fictionalized biography series), ALL of the libraries who carry them still put them in the biography section. At least when a book has notes and a bibliography, a child may notice that the author got their information from a particular place. Detailed back-matter may quietly make the distinction for the child between fiction and nonfiction, and that would be a very good thing!

 Dove Lempke
Received on Tue 09 Apr 2002 09:57:36 AM CDT