Familiar scene: Mother and foot-dragging boy appear at the librarian’s desk. “He doesn’t read,” announces the mother, “but he likes sports. Can you recommend some sports stories?” In this situation, I am dutiful. I pick out a mixture of series books (thank goodness for Roy MacGregor) and one-offs and I talk them up, but all the time I am niggled by doubts. Does this work? Does a person develop a taste for fiction by reading a novel about some interest or hobby?

Let’s get real. Some people, often of the male persuasion, never do cotton on to fiction. This is a pity, but amazing as it seems, thousands get through life without that deep pleasure. However, there is a more important question at stake for this kid. What we really hope is that he doesn’t miss out on the experience of engaging fully with a page of print. Non-fiction is obviously the answer, and in this area we often focus so much on content that we forget that non-fiction is still writing and deserves the close attention we give to fiction.

This season sees two children’s histories of hockey in Canada. Our Game by Dave Stubbs is a decade-by-decade
journey with descriptions of notable games and players, changes in rules and equipment, and a smidgen of social history to put it all in context. Ice Time by Michael McKinley is based on the CBC television series Hockey: A People’s History, and consists of 10 standalone chapters focusing on an individual player, game, or team. (Tundra’s parent company, M&S, has also produced an adult title that ties in with the same series.)

The books share a subject and a magazine-style approach to book design, their pages busy with sidebars, illustrations, and multiple narratives. The remarkable photos show what a rich visual history exists of our national game. And designers for both books are to be commended for creating variety in what is essentially a bunch of pictures of guys in sweaters with sticks.

There is great material in each book. I liked Stubbs’s catalogue of the things that served as early pucks: “rubber balls, frozen fruit, flattened tin cans, wooden pucks and even frozen horse manure.” In the McKinley book, I delighted in names of players and teams that sound as if they come right out of a Brian Doyle book: the Rat Portage Thistles, Newsy Lalonde, Didier “Cannonball” Pitre. The dipper and the hockey obsessive will delight in both books.

But what about the reader? What kind of reading experience do these two books offer? The difference between them highlights several issues in our approach to information books for the young. Take the issue of the general versus the specific. There are many historical and cultural lessons to be learned from a history of hockey, but the general is no place to start. That’s why we don’t read the encyclopedia for pleasure. We become engaged as readers when we zoom in to the specific. Stubbs keeps us at a safe, bland, middle distance. Describing a change in the game as the schedule became more gruelling, Stubbs writes, “The emotions sometimes spilled into fighting, a part of hockey that is enjoyed by some fans and is a turnoff for others.” If you’re going to raise the issue of hockey violence, it needs more analysis than that.

McKinley does a far better job of getting up close and personal, giving us the play-by-play. His narrative of Frank Frederickson, a Winnipeg boy who survived the Great War and went on to play on the Canadian hockey team at the 1920 Olympics, is crisply written, nicely shaped, and full of fascinating detail. During the war Frederickson’s ship was torpedoed, and he was rescued from a life raft in the Mediterranean “wearing only pajamas and clutching his violin.” Detail embedded in context – that’s what makes for good writing in any genre, and McKinley achieves this in every chapter.

As readers we also need to be in the presence of a distinctive voice. McKinley writes simply and clearly but without talking down. He is a fan among fans. He mentions the Cold War in his background to the 1972 Canada-Soviet series and deftly explains its significance. Stubbs is less adept at explaining the same political background.

The embarrassed sports kid with his mom would take either of these books and enjoy them. But for the real pleasure of reading, the experience of tasty language, a logical argument, a narrative, the revelation of character, a conversation with someone you enjoy, he’ll be better served with Ice Time.