Welcome to day 19 of 40 craft lessons.
Most stories are told chronologically because our brains better understand the consequences of events.
The story of Before She Was Harriet (2019, Lesa Cline-Ransome, James E. Ransome) doesn’t follow this order. It opens with Harriet as an old woman and then moves backward, stage by stage: she was a suffragist, but before that, she was General Tubman, and before that… The narrative gradually traces Harriet’s life all the way back to her childhood.
This is reverse chronology: it begins at the end and moves backward in time. In other words, the story opens with the final event (Z), then reveals what happened just before it (Y), then the scene before that (X), and so on, until we reach the very beginning (A).
Reverse chronology doesn’t suit very young readers, who still don’t have a clear understanding of time. For this reason, we don’t see it often in picture books.
Be careful not to confuse reverse chronology with flashback.
Hint: Reverse Chronology is Not a flashback.
Some picture book biographies begin with the character in adulthood and then flash back to their childhood, so it could be represented as Z-A-B-C-D… This is a flashback.
Before She Was Harriet is the only picture book I know of that is written in reverse chronology. If you know another example, please share it in the comments.
I hope reading this blog post has given you new ideas. See you tomorrow for Day 20.