Every Teacher's Thematic Booklist

Kelly L. Green is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual’s
Children’s Literature edition.

Scholastic has targeted the Canadian educational market with the
addition of some 300 Canadian-authored titles to this thematically
organized American catalogue of more than 1000 children’s books. The
book contains five indexes—The Index of Themes, The Index of Authors,
The Index of Titles, The Index of Book Abstracts, and The Index of
Awards—as well as three pages of teacher resources, and would be a
useful introduction to many literature-based themes.

The authors acknowledge in the introduction that “[t]he selection is
necessarily a limited one; with the wealth of excellent children’s
books available, and the many areas of interest, a list of this kind can
never be definitive.” Unfortunately, the selections of both themes and
books are not only not definitive, they are inadequate and
unsatisfactory. While the themes of “Persecution,” “Racism,”
“Social Issues,” “Disability,” and “Issues and Problems” are
all worthy, they might be considered a tad redundant when one considers
that there are no themes on topics related to women, Canadian history (a
few books are lumped into the one “History” theme), Europe, Africa,
Asia (there is an “Arctic & Antarctica” theme), or First Nations, to
name just a few ideas that leap readily to mind. The themes are also
extremely broad, and hence may be of limited value for those studying
topics in depth. Under each theme, books are listed alphabetically by
author, but once again, I was stunned at the number of classics the
authors omitted, such as Madeleine L’Engle’s superb A Wrinkle in
Time, suitable for “Science Fiction” or “Space Sciences &
Aviation-Fiction,” and Jean Little’s Mine for Keeps, suitable for
“Disability” or “Family Juvenile Books.” The abstracts are short
and serviceable but uninspiring, and the Teacher Resources section also
suffers from incompleteness (where are Paul Kropp’s The Reading
Solution and CBRA’s Canadian Children’s Literature 1993, 1994, and
1995?).

To say I was unimpressed by this project would be a profound
understatement.