{"id":26422,"date":"2018-07-17T07:30:30","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T11:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26422"},"modified":"2018-07-17T07:30:30","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T11:30:30","slug":"a-peril-of-the-page-turn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=26422","title":{"rendered":"A Peril of the Page Turn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writers, illustrators, and designers of picture books pay a lot of attention to the “page turn,” which is the\u00a0manner in which a book’s text and art\u00a0invite readers to turn to the next page. There’s an art form to deciding which lines of writing will grace a page, which pages remain blank, where to place the text on a spread, and whether to finish a sentence within\u00a0the spread or make the reader turn the page to find\u00a0the sentence ending.
\nAs you can imagine, books filled with surprises, like The Monster at the End of This Book <\/em>by Jon Stone and Michael Smollin (Golden Books),\u00a0<\/em>gleefully and appropriately employ cliff-hanger page turns.
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\nBut there are many more uses\u00a0of the page turn than luring readers forward. Page turns can be used to build suspense, upend expectations, highlight or enlarge a funny moment, introduce a quiet space, signal a change in the story, and so on.
\nMaurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0filled with\u00a0masterful page turns serving a variety of purposes, and it\u00a0concludes with the most famous example of a great page turn in all of children’s literature.\u00a0Sendak\u00a0takes us from Max’s outburst to his flight from home, sailing us “through night and day \/ and in out out of weeks”\u00a0into the land of the wild things.\u00a0Spread by spread, we go deeper in; some pages\u00a0have just a phrase of text,\u00a0others have a whole\u00a0vivid chunk. When Max tires of the rumpus and misses home, he sails back\u00a0“into the night of his very own room \/ where he found his supper waiting for him[.]” Then\u00a0readers turn the last page\u00a0and find just five simple words, no art:
\n\"\"<\/a>Ahhhhh, what a line! It isn’t strictly necessary for the\u00a0story to fulfill its promise \u2014 Max has made it back home\u00a0safely. But that extra little fillip of a line conveys\u00a0in five words just how much Max, despite his mischief, is loved. And those words are made more effective by living, simply and emphatically, on\u00a0their own page, rather than being\u00a0crowded onto the prior, art-filled page of the prodigal return. This page turn is almost the opposite of a cliff-hanger; it\u00a0expands upon the resolution rather than completing it. It’s a\u00a0bonus gift, unexpected and valuable.\u00a0That brilliant Sendak!
\nSo where’s the peril of the page turn, as promised in the title of this post? Well, lately, it seems that\u00a0the style of breaking up sentences across several pages is showing up in picture books for younger and younger audiences, for whom it\u00a0can undermine, rather than enhance, the experience of reading. I wasn’t aware of this problem until the other day, when\u00a0I overheard Flying Pig staffer Emily huff with frustration over a book she had just finished reading aloud\u00a0to her two-year-old. (Emily has two small children who get to hear a LOT OF BOOKS.)
\n“I hate it when authors break up the text so that you have to turn the page before you’re ready!” she said. “It doesn’t work when sentences are so broken up that you’ll lose the sense of the story if you don’t keep turning the pages, but then you’re rushing through the book. You don’t have time to look at the pictures.”
\nEmily, who is an editor as well as a bookseller and literary mom, is no slouch at useful critique. This one really struck me; I could see how picture book creators might overlook this unintended consequence of breaking up text.\u00a0In the thick of our months- or years-long involvement with the book, we\u00a0can forget that a reader’s first encounter with it is very different from our own familiarity. And sometimes in children’s books, we can forget the end user, focusing more on aesthetics or cleverness than the experience of the child, especially very young children.
\nSo authors, artists, designers, I invite you to visit your young picture books with the eyes and ears and curiosity of a two-year-old who wants to explore a page for a little while before moving on. And Emily, thanks for the insight! (P.S. The\u00a0cookies\u00a0in the snack box are still hot.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When breaking up text to propel readers forward actually works against the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}