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While there has been a notable increase in multicultural publishing over the past several years, this study indicates that the increase has not extended into genre fiction for middle-grade readers. The study entailed a content analysis of book reviews of fiction for the middle grades published between 1992 and 2001. A total of 4,255 reviews of genre fiction were analyzed. Although the 2000 U.S. Census indicated that about one third of the U.S. population of children is comprised of people of color, only 661, or less than one sixth, of the books were identified as containing at least one protagonist of color. In a more realistic representation of the world, about one third of the characters would be people of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most picture storybooks, the stories are told twice, once through text and once through illustration. The reader can comprehend such stories either through the words or through the pictures. Vandergrift called these books "twice-told tales"(68). Since both the texts and the illustrations of twice-told tales tell the same stories simultaneously, they employ parallel storytelling. Conversely, there exists a subset of picture storybooks for which the reader must consider both forms of media concurrently in order to comprehend the books' stories. Books belonging to this category employ interdependent storytelling. This paper presents a model and explicated examples of the major categories and subcategories of interdependent storytelling and a discussion of the role of interdependent storytelling in children's literary, artistic, and intellectual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]