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The best non-fiction picture books of 2014, as picked by the editors and contributors of The Children’s Book Review.

I didn’t look very carefully at Neighborhood Sharks when it first came in to the office, mostly because I’ve got such a soft spot for harbor seals (close relatives to elephant seals, the preferred prey for the great white sharks in this book). Also, I was kind of turned off by the limp dead seal and bloody red water on the cover.

Now that I’ve spent some quality time with this book, I still feel sad about the dead seal, but now I also admire the shark’s surprising configurations that allow it to be the perfect predator. And as much as I now admire sharks, I admire Katherine Roy’s artistry even more.

In the impressive and extensive back matter, Roy thanks David Macaulay for being her mentor. You can see his influence in several whimsical diagrams. Some of these provide visual analogies, like the one that explains the shark’s aerodynamic propulsion system and depicts a shark with wings and windows like an airplane. Another spread shows the food chain with a Macaulay-esque mix of scales: an enormous wooden spoon reaches into the ocean to stir a plankton “soup” while several gulls — each one smaller than the individual phytoplanktons and zooplanktons — perch on the handle and bowl of the spoon, eager for a taste.

So I have no doubt that Neighborhood Sharks is an exemplary information book and a good bet for a Sibert nod. But what about the Caldecott? Is this also an exemplary picture book with a narrative and forward momentum? I think it is, thanks especially to two elements.

First, all the bits of information about sharks’ anatomy and abilities are provided as digressions from a visual narrative that keeps moving forward in the illustrations even when the text does not refer to it. This progression begins on the title page and continues seamlessly to the end: a young elephant seal pursues and catches a fish; that seal is in turn pursued and caught by a great white shark; finally, that same shark is caught and tagged by a group of scientists in a boat. In my first reading, I was concentrating more on the information and didn’t notice this framing device, but it’s such a great idea. For one thing, it shows that the shark eating the seal is no worse than the seal eating its fish. That’s something I personally need to keep in mind. And by showing the scientists at the end, Roy is able to finish up with a wider view: the history of sharks and their future, including what we still need to learn about them. Besides providing a satisfying ending to the narrative, it also acts as a segue to the backmatter that describes, among other things, the days Roy spent on a boat with those same scientists.

The second aspect of this book that makes it potentially Caldecott-worthy is Roy’s skill as a watercolorist. Clearly these illustrations were done with the aid of photos and video (you can’t paint underwater scenes from life!), but there is a sense of motion and immediacy that one doesn’t often see in paintings based on photos. It’s clear the illustrator has spent plenty of time observing how water and fish move and how light is refracted underwater. Her changing points of view — sometimes below a shark, sometimes above — make us feel as if we are in there swimming alongside them.

But it’s her use of line and mass to show how the water moves that I find most impressive. Her brushwork is so assured, showing broad masses of various blues under the water, then breaking up the space with shorter brushstrokes to show motion and adding light pencil to outline shapes or indicate moving eddies of water. That blood fizzing and billowing out from the seal shows the direction the shark just swam in: not quite straight and probably shaking its head a bit. Roy’s style is realistic, but not slavishly so. Look at what she does when the shark breaches the surface of the water. Her pencil lines become darker and outline the ribbons of water. This is not something that one ever sees in a photo which either stops water in mid-drop (with a quick shutter speed) or blurs it (with a slower shutter). Instead, the ribbons of water are Roy’s method of indicating motion and the path of each splash. Outlining those brushstrokes in pencil makes the water look stylized, almost like a paisley pattern. It’s a bold choice and — to my eye at least — exactly right.

I want to mention two design decisions, one good and one problematic. Of course, the Caldecott committee should concentrate on illustration above design, but I think these are still worth mentioning. First, the lettering on the cover and title page are perfection. “Neighborhood” is in a friendly handlettered-looking typeface, while “Sharks” is sharp and glassy with little shark-tooth-shaped notches in some of the letters. The triangles in the top point of the “A” and the negative space below the “K” are echoed in the shark’s fins and its nose. My design quibble is with the interior typesetting. I kept getting distracted by the relatively small margin between the two columns of type. Since the leading (vertical space between lines of type) was quite generous, the horizontal space between columns seemed proportionally too small. There’s not really a rule about this, but I really really wanted to either nudge those columns farther apart or decrease the leading a little.

There seem to be many more information books to discuss this year than usual. Is this true, or has my perspective been narrowed because nearly all of my posts happen to be on nonfiction books?

Now it’s finally your turn. Do you think this has a chance at a Caldecott? Will it be compared to this year’s other information books, and, if so, how does it stand up to them?

The post Neighborhood Sharks appeared first on The Horn Book.

Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands
By Katherine Roy
David Macaulay Studio – Roaring Brook (Macmillan)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781596438743
Ages 7-12
On shelves now.

When you’re a librarian buying for your system, you come to understand that certain nonfiction topics are perennial favorites. You accept that no matter how many copies you buy, you will never have enough train or joke or magic books. And the king daddy topic to beat them all, the one that leaves a continual gaping hole in the Dewey Decimal area of 597.3 or so, is sharks. Kids can’t get enough of them. Heck, adults can’t get enough of them. Between Shark Week and movies like Sharknado, sharks haven’t been this pop culturally relevant since the good old days of JAWS. And sure, we’ve plenty of truly decent shark books on our shelves already. What we don’t really have are books that combine the blood and the facts with the beauty of full-color, wholly accurate paintings. We’ve never truly had a shark book that’s as accomplished and stunning as Katherine Roy’s Neighborhood Sharks. It’s crazy to contemplate that though shark books are never unpopular, only now did someone take the time and effort to give them a publication worthy of their terror and wonder.

A single great white shark cuts through the waters surrounding San Francisco’s Farallon Islands “just 30 miles from the city”. Prey comes in the form of a fine fat seal and before the mammal realizes what’s happening the shark attacks. What makes a shark the perfect killer? Consider its weapons. Note the body, covered in “skin teeth”, capable of acting like a warm-blooded fish. Observe its high-definition vision and five rows of teeth. Did you know that a shark’s jaws aren’t fused to the skull, so that they can actually be projected forward to bite something? Or the method by which you would go about actually tagging this kind of creature? With candor and cleverness, author/artist Katherine Roy brings these silent killers to breathtaking life. You may never desire to set foot into the ocean again.

It’s hard to imagine a book on sharks that has art that can compete with all those shark books laden with cool photographic images. Roy’s advantage here then is the freedom that comes with the art of illustration. She’s not beholden to a single real shark making a real kill. With her brush she can set up a typical situation in which a great white shark attacks a northern elephant seal. The looming threat of the inevitable attack and the almost Hitchcockian way she sets up her shots (so to speak) give the book a tension wholly missing from photo-based shark books. What’s more, it makes the book easy to booktalk (booktalk: a technique used by librarians to intrigue potential readers about titles – not dissimilar to movie trailers, only with books). There’s not a librarian alive who wouldn’t get a kick out of revealing that wordless two-page seal attack scene in all its horror and glory.

The remarkable thing? Even as she’s showing an eviscerated seal, Roy keeps the imagery fairly kid friendly. Plumes of red blood are far more esoteric and even (dare I say it) lovely than a creature bleeding out on land. You never see the shark’s teeth pierce the seal, since Roy obscures the most gory details in action and waves. There are even callbacks. Late in the book we see a shark attacking a faux seal, lured there by researchers that want to study the shark. Without having seen the previous attack this subsequent wordless image would lose much of its punch. And lest we forget, these images are downright lovely. Roy’s paintbrush contrasts the grey sea and grey shark with a whirling swirling red. You could lose yourself in these pictures.

Yet while Roy is capable of true beauty in her art, it’s the original ways in which she’s capable of conveying scientific information about sharks that truly won my heart. She’s the queen of the clever diagram. Early in the book we see an image of a shark’s torpedo-shaped body. Yet the image equates the shark with an airplane, overlaying its fins and tail with the wings and tail of a typical jet plane. Seeing this and the arrows that indicate airflow / how water flows, the picture does more to convey an idea than a thousand words ever could. I found myself poring over diagrams of how a shark can let in cold water and convert it in an internal heat exchange into something that can warm its blood. It’s magnificent. The close-up shot of how a shark’s five rows of teeth tilt and the shot that will haunt my dreams until I die of projectile jaws will easily satiate any bloodthirsty young shark lover hoping for a few new facts.

The projectile jaws, actually, are an excellent example of the tons of information Roy includes here that feels original and beautifully written. Roy is consistently child-friendly in this book, never drowning her text in jargon that would float over a kiddo’s head. Using the framing sequence of a shark attacking a seal, she’s able to work in facts about the creatures and their environment in such a way as to feel natural to the book. Neighborhood Sharks is one of the first books in the David Macaulay Studio imprint and like Mr. Macaulay, Ms. Roy is capable of artistic prowess and great grand factual writing all at once. The backmatter consisting of additional information, a word or two on why she decided not to do a spread on smell, Selected Sources, Further Reading, and a map of The Farallons is worth the price of admission alone.

The book is called “Neighborhood Sharks” for a reason. When we think of big predators we think of remote locations. We don’t think of them swimming along, so very close to places like the Golden Gate Bridge. Plenty of adults would be horrified by the notion that they might run into an unexpected shark somewhere. Kids, however, might see the prospect as exciting. Neighborhood Sharks has the potential to both satisfy those kids that have already read every single book on sharks in their local library and also convert those that haven’t already made sharks their favorite predator of all time. Remarkably beautiful even (or especially) in the face of straightforward shark attacks, this is a book that sets itself apart from the pack. If you read only one children’s shark book in all your livelong days, read this one. Disgusting. Delicious. Delightful.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Like This? Then Try:

• Surprising Sharks by Nicola Davies

• Tooth and Claw: The Wild World of Big Predators by Jim Arnosky

• Tough, Toothy Baby Sharks by Sandra Markle

Wonderful comic by Katherine Roy from the Joe Lambert-edited Comics Page for indie Vermont newspaper Seven Days.

comicspage:

25 Cents - Katherine Roy

Feb ‘09