To fully consider the potential of informational texts to serve as mentor texts in the elementary classroom, the authors propose an inquiry about the intersections among the author's intentions, instructional contexts, a teacher's approaches, and students' responses to informational texts when contemplating the roles these texts might serve. In this article, the authors investigate how the intentions of the author-illustrator, classroom teacher, and students relate and differ when introducing an informational picture book in the context of an inquiry-based kindergarten classroom. The analysis involves the perspectives of a children's author-illustrator, a classroom teacher, and kindergarten students as they self-selected an informational picture book to use as a mentor text.