A Review of the 57 Best Narrative Nonfiction Books for Kids

What Is Narrative Nonfiction?

Most of us are familiar with what is called “expository nonfiction.” These are the texts that explain the "Bill of Rights" or describe the planets of the solar system.

But what exactly is narrative nonfiction? Simply put, it’s a text that gets factual information across in a form that uses many of the elements of storytelling. An author of narrative nonfiction will typically introduce an actual character (perhaps a baseball player or a baby polar bear at the zoo) and narrate some sort of experience or journey that character has taken, all the while teaching kids a thing or two about history or zoology along the way.

By using a narrative structure (first this happened, then that, and that, and that), writers can relate nonfiction material using many of the techniques of the storyteller: characterization, dramatic tensions, foreshadowing, etc.

Narrative nonfiction provides kids with information in a format that is interesting to them.

Update: More Lists With Narrative Nonfiction Books

After falling in love with narrative nonfiction books while writing this article, I kept reading and making lists of all the new books I could find. You can find all the lists if you search the interenet for "Adele Jeunnette Hubpages. You will find links to all the articles I have written. Keep scrolling down; I've written quite a few articles on quite a few topics!

Here are some links for the lists I've put together: Narrative Nonfiction for Grades K-3, and Narrative Nonfiction for Grades 3-6.

1. The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons by Natascha Biebow

Ages 6-10; Format: picture book biography; Subjects: inventions, arty, creativity, crayons; Pages: 48

It would be fun to introduce The Crayon Man by showing children the kinds of implements children used for drawing implements before the invention of Crayola crayons: chalk, bits of colored clay. They would see quite soon that it is pretty hard to get a colorful, detailed picture with these kinds of materials.

It seems like Crayola crayons have always existed, but they actually had to be invented. In picture book format, author Natascha Biebow tells the true story of the inventor, Edwin Binney.

Crayons did exist before Binney came along, but they were made from colored clay which only made fat lines, broke easily, and were too expensive for most people to afford. And—oh yes— some of them were poisonous, a pretty big drawback when it came to using them with children.

Binney’s wife, a schoolteacher, told him that children needed some sort of drawing tools that were better, cheaper, and preferably not poisonous. So he got to work melting paraffin (you can show the children a piece of it so they have an idea what paraffin is like) on the stove and adding powdered colors to them.

After much tinkering, he developed non-toxic colors and designed a stick that would be easy for children to hold. Binney took his creations to the World’s Fair and they caught on right away.

Readers will be interested to learn that the company solicited children’s ideas for naming certain shades: “tropical rain forest,” “tickle me pink,” and, my favorite, “macaroni and cheese.” For a fun follow-up activity, take some shades of crayons and have children come up with new names for them.

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Steve Salerno’s illustrations are bright, lively, and—of course—colorful. The back matter of the book has a section that shows how crayons are made today, more information about Edwin Binney, and a selected bibliography.

2. The Marvelous Thing That Came From a Spring

Ages 5-8; Format: picture book nonfiction;Subjects: toys, inventions, creativity; Pages: 40

It would be great fun to bring in a Slinky and have it walk down an incline as a way of introducing The Marvelous Thing That Came From a Spring to children.
The Slinky was a toy that took the U.S. by storm in 1945, but, like many other inventions, it started as somewhat of an accident.

Back in 1943, Richard James had been assigned to invent something that would keep the Navy's fragile equipment from vibrating in rough seas. He was working with springs, and one day, when he knocked a torsion spring off a shelf, it seemed to "walk" instead of fall. He took it home to his son who was able to walk the spring down from the top of the stairs. Richard and his wife Betty decided it would make a great toy.

Anyone who's been in the business world knows it's not as simple as having a good idea. The author, Gilbert Ford, does a nice job of showing the next steps in the process. Betty searched the dictionary trying to find just the right name for their new toy. (Can you see a companion activity for the kids? Developing toys and then looking for just the right name?)

Richard went to the bank to get a loan to have 400 Slinkys made. Then, Richard went on the road to try to sell his idea, but toy sellers were skeptical. Finally, he persuaded the manager at the Gimbels department store to let him demonstrate it during the holiday season. The Slinky walked down the ramp and the store sold out of all 400 units that night.

When the postwar boom happened, the toy's popularity skyrocketed. Ford lets us know a little more about how Richard and Betty managed the business. Richard invented a machine that could manufacture their toy much faster, and Betty kept the phones and paperwork humming. The author's note at the end includes some more interesting tidbits. For example, it was launched into space on Discovery and has inspired a magician.

I love Ford's illustrations — a blend of paper cut-outs and actual objects that portray the period and the tone perfectly.

3. The Elephant’s New Shoe: A True Rescue Story by Laurel Neme

The Elephant’s New Shoe introduces children to animal conservation and tells the heartwarming tale of a baby elephant, injured terribly by a snare, and the people who worked to save him and help him walk again. The story starts with animal rescuer Nick Marx finding the wounded elephant and working to gain his trust, feeding him and inching closer until he was able to cuddle up and sleep with him the following night.

He succeeds finally in transporting the baby elephant to a rescue center where they were able to care for his wound, but the young animal also needed companionship, and some way to replace his severed foot. They solved the first problem by bringing in another elephant. For the second, it took them several tries, but they finally were able to devise a prosthetic foot for him.

The back matter includes more facts about elephants along with photos of the now teen-aged elephant walking around on his manufactured foot.

4. Nacho’s Nachos: The Story Behind the World’s Favorite Snack by Sandra Nickel

Most kids are familiar with nachos, but I’ll bet they don’t know that the snacks are actually named after someone, a fellow who worked at a restaurant on the Texas/Mexico border in 1940. InNacho’s Nachos, author Sandra Nickel follows through on her absolutely inspired idea to find out where nachos came from.

Turns out, they were devised by a fellow named Ignacio Anaya, who went by the common nickname “Nacho.” Nickel tells us briefly how he was born in northern Mexico, orphaned when he was young, and lived with his foster mother who made delicious quesadillas. Fast-forward to when Nacho is 23, working in a restaurant, and has a “special talent for making diners happy.” He was so good that the owner of the Club Victoria in Eagle Pass, Texas made sure to hire the young man for his restaurant.

One day, a local woman known for her outstanding cooking came in to the restaurant with her friends and asked Nacho to whip up some new kind of snack for them. We see Nacho in the empty kitchen – no cooks or owners around –trying to figure out what in the world he could make.

The rest is history. He took some freshly fried corn tortillas in a bowl, and— remembering his foster mother’s quesadillas— Nacho topped them with grated cheese and pickled jalapeno pepper. The woman and her friends loved the dish, and soon “Nacho’s Special” was on the menu of Club Victoria. People from miles around traveled to the restaurant to try the snack, and though children may not notice unless we point them out, customers included President Lyndon Johnson and actors John Wayne and Cantinflas.

Nacho’s dish soon made it all around the world, and of course in time they became simply known as “nachos.”

Illustrator Oliver Dominquez creates lively full-page art that conveys the atmosphere of the 40’s on the Texas border. The book includes a recipe for nachos, and an afterword that includes a picture of Nacho and his family.

5. Tani’s New Home: a Refugee Finds Hope & Kindness in America by Tanitoluwa Adewumi

Ages 5-9; Format: picture book biography; Subjects: refugees, chess players, perseverance, determination, Nigerian Americans; Pages: 32

When I saw the subtitle for Tani’s New Home, I knew that I had to put it on this list. In a time when it seems like all we hear about is people’s nastiness towards each other, it’s nice to read about a refugee finding hope and kindness in America. Add the fact that Tani Adewumi wrote this account of his life himself, and we can feel proud that America still has within itself to be a place of opportunity for an immigrant family.

Tani tells us his life story in the third person, how he felt secure in his Nigerian neighborhood until Boko Haram, a terrorist group, started to make life dangerous for his family. (He has taken pains not to make things too frightening for children, simply saying “Boko Haram hurt people who disagreed with them.”)
The family fled. Tani tells us how his older brother made him feel safe as they traveled by teaching him to play chess by using a chessboard and pieces made from paper. He talks of flying in a plane to their new home in America, and how it was hard to stay in unfamiliar rooms and to eat “gooey stuff called cheese” on everything. At first he was not a fan of all the cheeseburgers, cheese pizza, and macaroni and cheese.

But then he found out about the chess club at school , and was able to join because the fee was waived for his family who lived in a shelter. At first, he didn’t do well in competitions, but he remembered the coach’s words, “The people who do the best in chess are the ones who work the hardest.” A year later, he won the chess championship for the state.

New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof wrote about Tani’s story, and it’s worth reading his account. Notably, Tani’s family received more than $250,000 from a GoFundMe campaign, and the family has used much of that money to start a foundation that helps homeless people and refugees.

6. Sincerely, Emerson: A Girl, Her Letter, and the Helpers All Around Us by Emerson Weber

Ages 5-9; Format: nonfiction picture book ; Subjects: gratitude, thank-you notes, kindness, mail carriers, service industry workers, letter writing; Pages: 32

Sincerely, Emerson is perfect inspiration for a unit on writing letters and/or on gratitude, and would be especially good to read to a group of children around Thanksgiving. In telling her own story, young Emerson Weber tells us how much she loved to write letters to others and how one day she started thinking about the postal carrier who delivered her letters to family and friends all over. So, she wrote a letter thanking him for all that he did.

Next week, he brought her two boxes full of letters from mail carriers all over the country who were happy to be noticed and thanked. After she had answered many of the letters, she got to thinking about all the people who are out there working to keep the world going: grocery store clerks, trash collectors, farmers, nurses, bus drivers. The book ends saying, “Emerson wish that everyone she knew would take a moment to notice each one of them, and thank them… maybe even think each other… sincerely.

In an afterword, Emerson tells us she knows the story is “100% true” because it really did happen to her. The story was apparently picked up by the media, because she got to be on television, and she even received a letter from her favorite singer, Taylor Swift. She says, “All of that made me super happy of course, but it also made me think. Why was my saying thank you such a big deal? Isn’t saying thank you, and meaning it, something we should all be doing all the time? I think so – so I’m going to keep doing it! And I hope you will, too.”

It’s a short, charmingly illustrated book that can help spread the gratitude and kindness we want to foster in our children.

7. Let Liberty Rise! How American Schoolchildren Helped Save the Statue of Liberty by Chana Stiefel

Ages 5-8; Format: picture book nonfiction; Subjects: New York, Statue of Liberty, newspapers, money-raising campaigns, working together, mobilizing community; Pages: 40

Let Liberty Rise tells how the schoolchildren of America banded together to make history and contribute to one of our nation’s richest symbols. It’s a good book to read to a group of children if you are planning to start any kind of cooperative project with them.

As the book begins, we learn that the country of France decided to give the people in the United States a huge and impressive statute that celebrated liberty. The good people of France got together and collected the money needed to build the statue itself, and the United States agreed to raise the money to construct a pedestal that would hold her weight and also be a fitting addition to the statue.

But, the people of the US did not do so well at raising the money. Even when the statue had been cast and sent to us in pieces to assemble, we didn’t have the money to build a place to put it. The rich folks of the United States couldn’t be bothered to donate to the cause. That’s a bit embarrassing, don’t you think?

Enter Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant who realized the importance of the Statue of Liberty. He decided to start a fundraising campaign himself. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to get the money. [Lady Liberty] is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America. It is the gift of the whole people of friends to the whole people of America.” And in a stroke of genius, he said that his newspaper, The World would print the name of every one who donated to the fund, no matter how small the donation was.

Young children loved the idea that they could get their name in paper. Soon, all the small change that they had gathered started pouring in. “Schoolchildren everywhere emptied their piggy banks. In the first week, The World raised more than $2,000!” Here, the book gives us little illustrations and mini-stories. One girl sent in 60 cents. “I wish I could make it $60,000,” she wrote, “but drops make an ocean.”

The children from one family, who were taking French lessons, sent in a dollar. Another group of 14 saved up the money they were going to spend on candy to help with the fund.

Finally, all the donations added up to $100,000. It turns out that 120,000 people had donated the money, so it was indeed from thousands and thousands of small donors.

Next, we get to see the statute assembled – the image of giant toes swinging past construction workers is priceless—and then we see the dedication ceremony.
The illustrations are absolutely wonderful. They give a sense of how enormous the statue is, and also charmingly depict all the children who contributed to the campaign. It’s especially good for reading to a group, and I really liked the two-page spread that shows Lady Liberty and the pedestal in all her glory with fireworks going off behind her.

The back matter includes a timeline, more facts about the Statue of Liberty, a bibliography and suggested websites, and several photos of the statue and Joseph Pulitzer.

8. Thank You Doctor Salk! The Scientist Who Beat Polio and Healed the World by Dean Robbins

Ages 6-10; Format: picture book biography; Subjects: vaccines, polio, scientists, virologists; Pages: 40

Thank You Doctor Salk! has all the ingredients you need to introduce children to the concept of vaccines, and the people who develop them. It’s a brief picture book that will only take about 10 minutes to read; the language is simple but evocative; and the large illustrations provide both poignancy and liveliness, depending on what the story needs.

The book starts when Salk is a young boy living in the city. As he watches his neighbors pass by, he sees that some are on crutches or in wheelchairs because they contracted polio. In these pages, it does mention that some of the victims even died, but does not dwell on it.

Children may recognize the situations described in the next page when people kept away from bakeries and banks, pools and parks to avoid catching the virus. “People prayed for a cure, but who could stop this terrible epidemic?” We look on the next page, and see Jonas as a young boy, standing resolute with curly hair, glasses, a suit and tie, and knee bridges. “Jonas knew who,” the book tells us. “He would stop it!”

Over the next few pages we see Jonas going to school and training to be a scientist all through elementary school, high school, college, and medical school. Then we see him experimenting to try to find the right mixture for a vaccine for “polio, the sneakiest virus of all.”

The story takes us through the support he received while working in the vaccine (including the establishment of the March of Dimes) and the process of testing it once he had a viable candidate. We see children being vaccinated in schools, and afterwards receiving lollipops, pins, and a special card that names them a “Polio Pioneer.”

It is nice to see the street scene of jubilation once it was determined that the vaccine definitely worked in a large population. We see children waving and shouting from their apartments. “Cars honked! Bells rang! The adults danced! Children jumped for joy!” And we learn that Doctor Salk did not sell his vaccine, but instead gave it away for free for all the people.

The end matter includes an author’s note giving more detail about Doctor Salk’s accomplishment, information on how the vaccine fights the virus, the vaccine timeline, and a list of additional resources.

There may not be that many people left anymore who have suffered the crippling effects of polio, but I still have an aunt who has to wear a brace on one leg because she contracted polio as a child, and the leg didn’t grow normally after that. She had to spend eight or nine months in the city hospital, 200 miles away from her family when she was only seven years old. It is hard to imagine how terrible it was to have your child struck out of the blue with such a terrible illness. Unfortunately, it is sometimes also hard for us to remember how much fear, illness, and suffering vaccines have prevented in our lives, advances for which we should forever be grateful.

9.The Boy Who Thought Outside the Box: The Story of Videogame Inventor Ralph Baer by Marcie Wessels

Ages 5-9; Format: picture book biography ;Subjects: inventors, engineers, creativity, video games, perseverance, discrimination, Jews in World War II; Pages: 48

It seems unlikely that an idea like video games would start with a little Jewish boy living in Cologne Germany, but in The Boy Who Thought Outside the Box, we learn the story. At the start, we have a boy named Ralph Baer playing with things like hoops, scooters, hockey sticks, and bicycles. However, Germany was no place for his family at the time, and they emigrated to the United States. He was an inquisitive boy who likes to build and tinker, and when he was in the Army he figured out how to put together a radio for the guys in the barracks.

After the war, he came back and learned all about how to build televisions. He had an idea that people could maybe play games on their televisions, but no one seemed very interested in the idea in 1951, and he went on to build things for NASA, including a radio transmitter in a video camera that Neil Armstrong took to the moon.

Around 1956, he brought back his idea of a console that would hook into a television so that people could play games. I had to smile when I read the sentence, “Ralph showed his Brown Box to cable and TV companies everywhere, but no one thought playing games on a television set was a good idea.

As we know, he persevered, and in 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey was offered for sale. It would be worth showing children a video of the game Pong which was based on one of the games offered through the Odyssey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4VRgY3tkh0

The sunny illustrations capture the time, and back matter includes and offers no with more information, additional readings, and a selected bibliography.

10. A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything by Kirsten W Larson

Ages 6-10; Format: picture book nonfiction; Subjects: women superheroes, women’s movement, comic book characters, women superheroes; Pages: 40

In the process of telling the story of the Wonder Woman character, A True Wonder also gives a good introduction to the history of the women’s movement in the mid-20^th century.

At the beginning of the book, author Kirsten Larson tells us, “When Wonder Woman arrived in America, she wasn’t the superhero most people had in mind. After all, she was a woman. But that was the point. She had an important mission: To change minds about what women could do. And to change the world.”