CAN PICTURE BOOK BIOGRAPHIES RHyme?

When my older children were young, they liked this picture book biography:

Johnny Appleseed is written by Reeve Lindbergh and is illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen. The poetic text and folk art illustrations meld beautifully to tell the story of John Chapman, the legendary man who planted apple trees and spread apple seeds throughout the Midwest. 

With autumn arriving and apple-picking underway, I was reminded of this book. My mind then wandered to wonder -- can picture book biographies (PBBs) be written in rhyme today?

In my search, I discovered The Amazing Scientists books from The Innovation Press, written in verse by Julia Finley Mosca and illustrated by Daniel Rieley:

The Girl Who Thought in Pictures: the Story of Dr. Temple Grandin (2017)
The Doctor With and Eye for Eyes: the Story of Dr. Patricia Bath (2017)
The Girl With a Mind for Math: the Story of Raye Montague (2018)
The Astronaut With a Song for the Stars: the Story of Dr. Ellen Ochoa (2019)

If you are interested in writing PBBs in rhyme, this series would make a good study. Each 40-page book includes the story of the scientist, which follows a chronological arc of the scientist's life and accomplishments. After the story is a four-spread section of back matter, which includes fun facts, a timeline, a more detailed biography, and a bibliography.

Ask yourself:
What do I like about the rhyming text? What are the patterns of rhythm and rhyme, and what poetic devices are employed in the telling? 
What picture book story elements are included, and how are they executed?
Is there anything I don't like about the rhythm and rhyme?
What would this story have been like if it were NOT written in rhyme?

I appreciate that these books focus on female scientists. I feel the text-in-verse has good rhythm and rhyme, and the back matter is thorough. 

But the conclusions of the books "break the fourth wall" by speaking directly to the reader, instructing them about what the "lesson" of the story is. I'm not a fan of this -- it feels too didactic to me, but was likely the publisher's goal for the ending message. Also, I missed playful, poetic devices, like those I found in Johnny Appleseed (example to right).

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Another approach by authors who prefer poetry is to write PBBs in free verse and/or sprinkle the text with some rhythm and rhyme in strategic places. I found this approach particularly well-suited to biographies about people who excelled in artistic endeavors, like writing and music. 

A Poem for Peter: the Story of Ezra Jack Keats and the Creation of The Snowy Day is written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Lou Fancher & Steve Johnson. The author uses a lyrical narrative to tell the story of a boy with a dream to create art, whose eventual path leads him to the creation of the beloved book, The Snowy Day.
One of my favorite spreads (below) is when the character Peter finally arrives on the scene. Although the narrative isn't always in rhyme, we find rhyme here, as well as anaphora in the repetition of Peter's name, and the lovely "B" alliteration in that last line. So nice.

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Drum Dream Girl: How One Girl's Courage Changed Music by Margarita Engle and Rafael López is "inspired by a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba's traditional taboo against female drummers." The author (and former Children's Poet Laureate) tells of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga's quest to be a drummer in the book's poem. In the passage below, notice the "W" and "P" words in the upper part of the passage and the brilliance of the last five lines which, when read aloud, feel like the rhythm of a heartbeat.

So, yes! Picture book biographies are still being written in rhyme today, whether in strict rhyming text, or in free verse, or in a text peppered with bits of poetry. Study more mentor texts and plunge right in!
~ Patricia Toht