RESEARCH General Education

CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Experts' online guide offers help in picking right book for a child

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

12/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand Deborah Stevenson edited the 13-page "Guide Book to Gift Books: An Annotated List of Books for Youth," published by Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Books make great gifts for kids, no doubt about it. But, how do you decide which book would be good for the child or children on your list?

With some 5,000 new children’s trade books published in the United States every year, and some 188,000 children’s books in print, you’d have to be an expert in children’s literature to make an informed decision.

But you needn’t fret or sweat any longer. The experts have done the work for you.
Reviewers at The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have culled the titles of more than 150 of the best books they have reviewed during the past two years to help gift-givers navigate the dense forest of children’s books.

The 13-page "Guide Book to Gift Books: An Annotated List of Books for Youth," published by Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science, is available as a downloadable PDF file. The guide is $3.50, and can be purchased online with a credit card.

According to Deborah Stevenson, the editor of the guide and the Bulletin, all books were previously recommended in full Bulletin reviews. Entries are divided into three age groups: picture books for young readers, 6-8 years old; books for middle readers, 9-11; and for older readers, 12-18. In addition to a brief annotation, each entry includes author, title, publisher and list price.

A wide range of styles, genres, subjects and challenge levels are included in the guide. Books deal with personal challenges, including ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), sibling rivalry, dysfunctional families, Chinese poetry, divorce and growing up Arab-American. A sample: "Anderson, M.T. ‘Feed.’ Candlewick, 2002. $16.99. Grades 7-12. In this darkly funny futuristic satire, most people get their information, education, and conversation from a computer feed in their brains – but what happens when something goes wrong?"

The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, founded at Illinois in 1945, is published monthly, except in August, by GSLIS. It is devoted to the review of current books for children and young adults, and is one of the nation’s leading journals of literature for youth.

The Center for Children’s Books, also at Illinois, houses a research (non-circulating) collection of more than 12,000 recent and historically significant trade books for youth – birth through high school – plus review copies of nearly all trade books published in the United States in the current year. The collection also includes more than 1,000 professional and reference books on the history and criticism of literature for youth, literature-based library and classroom programming and storytelling.

Although the collection is non-circulating, it is available for examination by scholars, teachers, librarians, students and other educators, said Janice Del Negro, the director of the center.