Stacked Shelves

I put the wrong label on The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill by Megan Frazer Blakemore. In bookstores, adult books are separated by genre. This is fine. And it’s fine in the adult sections of libraries. But most of us don’t do that in the children’s section because we don’t want to limit what our kids read. If you group all the mysteries and separate them from the pack, you’re already telling some kids, oh, you don’t want to read these! Instead, we want kids to browse the stacks. We want them to make discoveries.  Sometimes, though, they are assigned a type of book (historical fiction or mystery or science fiction) to read and report on. And, so, to make life easier in those cases, we (children’s librarians) have little genre stickers for book spines. I like to get the genre right.  On the title page verso (fancy name for the page that has publisher’s info), publishers will often do some cataloging and list the book’s subjects. The good people at Bloomsbury Children’s Book