The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English

Rating:
Summary: Useful, Engaging, periodically irritating
Review: I bought this book just before Christmas hoping to learn a little about a English illustrator and children's book writer called Gladys Peto, whose work I collect in a small way. She escaped Mr. Watson's detection or didn't make the cut. I next checked on another personal favorite, illustrator Margaret Evans Price. Again, among the missing. I turned to the article on Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House Books", and was put off by the spelenetic tone and politically correct pretensions I found there, e.g.: "These are mostly moral tales for children but they also establish a clear picture of male dominance." The cold hand (heart?) of academe governs this book. (It must be hard to be the children's lit. guy at the Faculty Club where Stephen Hawking and his ilk have lunch...)
That said, I have enjoyed reading this book and learned much that I did not know. My little collecting activities have been better informed and I have made frequent use of the book as a reference tool. It has helped and will help me make informed choices of good books for my two small children, which was the other thing I was hoping for when I laid out my...

Rating:
Summary: An odd and quirky assortment of entries
Review: I found this compendium of review and comment to be highly inconsistent in quality and analysis from entry to entry. Although I was glad to see that Annie Fellows Johnston's Little Colonel series was included, the series is not given its due as a contributing element to literary works for girls at the turn of the 1900s. Aileen Fisher and Kitty Barne also receive less coverage and analysis than they deserve. Ironically, there is a long section under "n" devoted to "neglected works"! This is a higgledy-piggledy catchall section in a book that should devote more attention to many of the writers listed in that entry. A huge amount of ink is devoted to a long and rambling section called "publishers and publishing"; another long segment is called "information books." Obviously no encyclopedia of children's literature can include everyone's favorite author or aspect of the field. This book, however, needs tightening and recasting in the next go-round.

Rating:
Summary: Not that accessible
Review: This book has a lot of information but not in a very accessible format. It is not easy to read or use.