I’ve been thinking a lot lately about nonfiction text structures. I love lots of nonfiction picture books with traditional story structures: following a character through her life from birth to death, or recounting an event from beginning to end. But there are lots of other text structures possible, as well. Whale Trails: Before and Now elegantly sets up a compare/contrast structure to explore the differences between whale watching trips with whaling voyages.

The design of the book invites the reader to compare and contrast. Every spread has, on the left, full color with illustrations that bleed to the edges of the page. The right hand page of the spread, though has a black and white illustration enclosed within borders. But every spread deals with the same idea, showing how it differs or is the same across the centuries.

The narration is in first person present tense:

My father and I live for the sea. He is the captain of the Cuffee whale boat, and today I am his first mate.

But it invites us to look back to the past:

Before now, each generation of my family sailed these waters in search of whales.

We see the whale watching travelers traveling up the gangplank, and the whaling boat crew traveling up the gangplank; the route of the whale watching cruise and the route of the whaler; the gear aboard the whale watching cruise and the gear aboard the whaler, and so forth.

This fascinating book is another great example of a book with solid nonfiction content that ably uses a fictional framework–the girl who is serving as first mate today. Would you shelve this in the fiction section? Or the nonfiction? I’m not sure, but I think it’s clear to the reader what is fact and what is not.

I’ve never gone whale-watching, but I loved doing it virtually in this book!

Whale Trails: Before and Now, by Lesa Cline-Ransome. Christy Ottaviano Books: 2015.

I participate in the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge hosted by Kid Lit Frenzy.