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More to the story. (Reader at Large).

Article Excerpt
Have you noticed how long the author's note in picture books, especially nonfiction picture books, has gotten these days? Much longer than the main text, in some cases. This might be because picture-book nonfiction is a hot format right now. Caught up in the zeitgeist, authors with at least a hundred pages worth of stuff to say are trying to cram what they can into thirty-two pages. So, like a seven-foot-tall man napping on a loveseat, something is bound to hang over the edge.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many of these author's notes contain insightful personal anecdotes about the writer's research process and about the circumstances that led her to her topic in the first place. They also often help put the narrative into a larger context, i.e., they help readers understand why what they just read was important.

But whenever I come across these lengthy chunks of extra information, I find myself wondering who they are for. Kids? Parents and teachers? Reviewers, who, as Russell Freedman pointed out in the November/December 2002 Horn Book, will "roast" authors for not providing enough back matter to demonstrate that they've done a "responsible job" and know what they are talking about?

The answer to this question isn't always the same, nor is it always easy to figure out.

I'd been keeping an eye on author's notes for a while when I came across Chris L. Demarest's 2002 title Smokejumpers One to Ten (McElderry). It's a counting book about those brave souls who parachute into the wilderness to fight forest fires, a companion to his Firefighters A to Z (McElderry), illustrated in a similar you-are-there style with dynamic pastel artwork....

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