I recently received an inquiry from someone asking for current information on Canadian writing for young adults. My suggestions were cumbersome. Sheila Egoff’s The New Republic of Childhood and Judith Saltman’s Modern Canadian Children’s Books, excellent sources both, are a decade out of date. To find current information was going to involve extensive hunting and gathering. But an important new reference work has just filled that gap ably.

In Canadian Children’s Books: A Critical Guide to Authors and Illustrators, the hunter-gatherer duo of Raymond E. Jones and Jon C. Stott, both of the University of Alberta, have compiled a well-researched, reliable, useful, and most welcome guide. The volume consists of 133 entries. Each piece includes a bibliography, a critical essay, and a list of reviews and other sources. Extra goodies include an introduction tracing the history of Canadian children’s books and an appendix of book awards.

Many decisions go into the making of such a book, and Jones and Stott have chosen sensible options. Their complete bibliographies make for enduring utility and a number of intriguing surprises. Who knew, for example, about the novels Barbara Smucker published in the 1950s? Which of our writers once published an article in Miss Chatelaine on “Barmaiding in an Irish Pub”? (It was O.R. Melling, writing under her real name of Geraldine Whalen.) Who noticed when Kathy Stinson’s Those Green Things and Robert Munsch’s The Mud Puddle appeared with revised texts?

Another good decision was to give equal attention to illustrators, one step toward alleviating the critical silence that usually greets their work. Jones and Stott gain space by de-emphasizing biographical information, of which we have plenty in this personality-oriented world, and by giving only short entries to writers whose interest is primarily scholarly and historical, such as Ernest Thompson Seton. Finally, I noticed that the authors apply more stringent critical standards to established than to emerging writers and illustrators. This isn’t just Canadian niceness. There’s no point stepping on seedlings.

The question of which writers and illustrators to choose was obviously a sticky one. In the introduction the authors give as their criteria historical importance, influence, and critical acclaim including awards and popularity. They also attempt to head reviewers off at the pass by saying that not all writers who meet the criteria are included. Fair enough. We could happily debate the fact that I would have included Teddy Jam, Loris Lesynski, and Nellie McClung. In one case, though, I think there is a real oversight. This guide would have been more useful and representative if it had included an entry on Jan Andrews, whose picture book texts in particular are both innovative and influential.

The essays are solid and reasonable. You don’t hear the sound of any axes grinding. They consist primarily of plot summaries, not the most dynamic of approaches perhaps, but very useful. They reliably steer one toward an author’s or illustrator’s best work and they are adept at pointing out when an artist has made a leap into something new. One slight oddity that results from the completeness of the entries is that the length of the articles depends on the quantity of publication. The piece on Mary Blakeslee, for example, is twice as long as that on Dayal Kaur Khalsa.

Inevitably Jones and Stott have more sympathy with some genres than others. Their critical approach is basically issues-oriented. They are therefore very solid on books that are clearly about something — historical fiction, contemporary realism of the grittier sort, and myth-based fantasy. They are also good with what they tactfully call “commercial fiction.” They have a less sure hand with lighter fiction for younger children, poetry, and humour. The latter seems to make them somewhat uneasy. Of Dennis Lee’s Garbage Delight, for example, they say, “As in earlier volumes, Lee includes several silly and exaggerated characters. ‘Suzy Grew a Mustache’ recounts the foolish ways in which two girls try to rid themselves of facial hair.”

The essays are mercifully free of critical jargon. Only one use of terminology confused me. When Sheila Egoff invented the term “problem novel” in the 1960s, it was to classify a school of juvenile fiction characterized by flat, clichéd prose, generic settings, and conventional trivial themes. Coming from Egoff’s pen, the term was not a compliment! In this volume, however, it seems to be a simple genre description, so that Budge Wilson, for example, is described as “primarily a problem novelist.” Either we don’t agree about Wilson or we’re not speaking the same language.

This slight tendency to earnestness aside, however, this book satisfied my number one criterion for a useful critical source in that it led me back to the original works refreshed and intrigued. Jones and Stott call Bill Freeman’s The Shantymen of Cache Lake a minor Canadian classic. Maybe I’ll go reread it to find out if I missed something. They say that Pattie Stren’s There’s a Rainbow in My Closet has weak characterization. Did they miss something? They remind us of writers and illustrators we may have forgotten because they have no recent work, such as Myra Paperny, Ruth Nichols, Frank Newfeld, and William Pasnak. They don’t forget undervalued figures such as the erudite and risk-taking Donn Kushner.

One of Jones’s and Stott’s stated goals for this book is to encourage further thought, research, critical notice, and writing. A remark in the Kevin Major article suggests one direction such criticism might take. Major says, “I want my work to be judged on its quality, on how well it works as a piece of fiction.” The richness and variety evident in this guide suggest to me that our children’s books are now ready to be seen not just as cultural artifacts or tools for the inculcation of values, but as art, as made objects, fashioned from words and rhythm, paint and paper. The time has come for such attention, and this volume may well be its springboard.