Over the last few years, the big trend in both kid and adult publishing has been the burgeoning growth of non-fiction – what the librarians used to call “information books” and keep on shelves for kids whose teachers had assigned projects about gerbils or the moons of Jupiter. These books used to be dull, serious, illustrated in basic black-and-white, and interesting only to the extent that they had to be cribbed for next week’s project. But times have changed, and today’s juvenile non-fiction creators are borrowing elements from both fiction and magazines to hook kids.

Celia Godkin’s Sea Otter Inlet is a gorgeous new picture book that seems almost too beautiful to be on the information-book shelf. Godkin has all sorts of impressive non-fiction credentials: She teaches scientific illustration, won the Children’s Literature Roundtables Information Book Award in 1990 for Wolf Island, and is an assistant professor in biomedical communications at the University of Toronto. But make no mistake, the illustrations in Sea Otter Inlet aren’t dull, medical-text drawings. Luminous, mixed-media works done in watercolour and coloured pencil, they’re absolutely breathtaking on the large book’s double-page spreads.

Nor is the text a dull recital on the varieties of sea otters, their environment, and daily life. Sea Otter Inlet is a story where the protagonist sea otters are killed by hunters, the ecology of their inlet goes to wrack and ruin, and nasty purple sea urchins begin to take over the entire area. The whole situation looks hopeless indeed, when another group of sea otters makes a triumphant return and restores ecological harmony. The conclusion is enough to make readers both young and old shout, “Yea! Sea otters to the rescue!” This non-fiction book leaves readers surprisingly moved, if not teary-eyed, at the end.

Of course, weaving a story into non-fiction material is only one way to engage young readers. Another is to get “interactive,” an adjective that can be applied to both computers and print. Pamela Hickman’s Animal Senses: How Animals See, Hear, Taste, Smell and Feel has a title so long it sounds like a university thesis, but the book itself will strike most 10- to 12-year-old readers as “way cool.”

Hickman and artist Pat Stephens use all the Owl magazine techniques for making non-fiction material interesting to kids – short and crisp main text, sidebars like “If you were a frog,” and experiments to test binocular vision, or show why we have two ears, or why our taste buds don’t work as well as those of a butterfly. The entire book is dotted with interesting pieces of trivia: butterflies, for instance, taste things with their feet; lizards use their tongues to clean their eyes. There’s enough here to intrigue the most jaded preteen.

The illustrations are magazine-style too. Some are double-page close-ups of frogs and foxes and birds done with a hyper-realistic Robert Bateman style that shows every single hair of an animal’s fur. On other pages, Pat Stephens has opted for simpler, quick sketches to illustrate experiments or sidebar items. The overall effect is one of great visual and textual variety, of a surprise on every page.

So what is happening to kids’ non-fiction – or non-fiction generally – that is giving it such market and reader appeal? A few years ago, the non-fiction authors in The Writers’ Union of Canada put forward the idea of renaming their genre “creative documentary” because the line between fiction and non-fiction was becoming increasingly hard to define. The novelists and poets scoffed at this, but time has proven the non-fiction writers prophetic – the new “information book” can take many forms. Non-fiction accounts for well over half of all book sales in Canada. A look at publishers’ catalogues shows that non-fiction for kids is booming.

Some of our top writers for kids – Linda Granfield, Diane Swanson, Shelley Tanaka, Pat Hancock, and Paulette Bourgeois (when she’s not supervising Franklin’s proliferation) – are writing non-fiction that keeps bookstore cash registers whirring. Well-known fiction writers like Claire Mackay and Barbara Greenwood have gone beyond using elements of real life in stories to documenting real life itself in Bats About Baseball and The Kids Book of Canada. Some of this recent boom is attributable to cyclic shifts in kids’ interests, but much has to do with the slick new means non-fiction writers are using to reach their readers. Stories, games, experiments, sidebars, cartoons, trivia, gorgeous illustrations, and all the treats designers can dream up are all part of the enlarged bag of non-fiction tricks. Sea Otter Inlet and Animal Senses show just how fine – and how different – the resulting books can be.