So now, what can parents do? I think one of the challenges for parents is that typically the parent most involved with the child in reading is the mother, and that mother may not think of herself as liking nonfiction.
She may particularly recall books she loved as a child that she’s so eager to share with her children, or she may have a special feeling about what fiction offers, and it is absolutely, kids will continue to read many wonderful novels in school.
I think that mother may not recognize how much nonfiction she actually reads. I mean, if we add self-help and diet into the world of nonfiction, I actually think… we know adult males read more nonfiction than fiction, but I think if we add the full set of categories of nonfiction, I think adults in general read more nonfiction than fiction. But the second thing is, so much really good upper elementary, middle school, and now YA nonfiction is being written, I think those same parents will come to discover this is a literature they had never seen.
That they did not know that books like this existed, because their own memory, much as they have this treasured memory of Judy Blume or the book that spoke to them so, or Harriet the Spy or Wrinkle in Time that spoke so perfectly, may well have experienced nonfiction through those very textbooks that we’re moving away from or from a teacher whose dry recitation of facts killed whatever interest that parent may have had in nonfiction.
I think the books that parents will find are much richer than that, and there’s one wonderful, wonderful hidden truth about nonfiction for younger readers, and I mean K-12, the entire spectrum. I was on a listserv recently where we were talking about nonfiction for this age, and a British publisher came on the listserv and he said, “You know, you have something in America that exists nowhere else in the world,” and that is we have these handcrafted nonfiction books that are by single author that are not a series, in which the author picks the photos and the author works on design.
So that means that our books, from picture book to 12th grade, are made with the same care as a 32-page picture book, where we the author are working on where does the text go, where does the art go, how does the page turn work, how can we create an immersive experience so that the reader is taken into the world we’re discussing, rather than being lectured at about that world.
And this does not exist in any other country. In other countries, there is series nonfiction, which kind of takes a set of familiar topics and may be beautifully illustrated, but is not an individual creation, and I hope those parents, as they start to look at our books, will recognize that craft, which is the same kind of craft that goes into fiction, where one author has a story she wants to tell.
And moving further on that, adult nonfiction isn’t illustrated. Coffee table books are, or you have a biography which has a set of black-and-white photos in the middle of the book. So they as adult readers may not recognize this wealth of illustration, that… I always think illustration is the wrong word, because illustration means I say “sunrise,” I show a picture of a sunrise.
This is immersion. This is where we’re using real archival images to be like a diorama in a museum. And I’m very proud of us for doing that.