CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Large worlds for small readers

By Peter F. Neumeyer, 12/2/2001

Larky Mavis

By Brock Cole

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., $16. Ages 6-10

Mouse Colors:

A Very First Book

By Jim Arnosky

Clarion Books, 48 pp., $5.95.

Ages 3-6

The Elephant Book

By Ian RedmondCandlewick Press, 48 pp., $17.99. All ages

Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354

By James Rumford

Houghton Mifflin, 40 pp., $16. Ages 4-8

Desert Town

By Bonnie and Arthur Geisert

Houghton Mifflin, 32 pp., $16. Ages 4-8

Nursery Crimes

By Arthur Geisert

Houghton Mifflin, 32 pp., $16. Ages 4-8

Hansel and Gretel

By Beni Montresor

Atheneum, 32 pp., $17. Ages 4-8

The Little Wing Giver

By Jacques Taravant; illustrated by Peter Sis

Holt, 32 pp., $14.95. Ages 4-8

365 Super Science Experiments With Everyday Materials

By Judy Breckenridge, Muriel Mandell, Anthony D. Fredericks, and Louis V. Loesehnig; illustrated by Frances Zweifel

Sterling, 320 pp., $12.95

''I give no comments nor explanations. I just sit among the children, open one of my books and ask, `What is this?' `Why?'''

BENI MONTRESOR

Children's illustrator, died October 2001

''A good line looks like an accident. It should always be just out of control.''

BROCK COLE

Children's book author

It's the layers of possibility and meaning, a sort of ''duplicity,'' that make the best children's books lasting and irresistible. Adults, often to their surprise, will find as much in the books as do the children - though not necessarily the same things. This year, we've already sung praises for de Brunhoff's ''Bonjour, Babar!'' (February) and Peter Sis's stunning ''A Small Tall Tale From the North'' (July). Here are some more - for the family, in the holiday season.

Brock Cole has, I swear, the finest ear for the traditional bone-true lilt of the Anglo-American folk voice. ''Down the road came Larky Mavis, mooning about, mooning about,'' the rapid tale ''Larky Mavis'' begins. Mavis, a patched, disheveled, red-haired village oddity, trips over three peanuts. From the third there springs forth her morphologically indeterminate progeny, whom she names Heart's Delight. As the scandalized villagers seek to avoid Mavis and to comprehend her odd ''baby,'' a Higher Power makes off with the ragtag girl, spiriting her to more congenial air, ''far, far away ... where babies grow in peanut shells.'' Cole's exuberant line and rapid wash illustrations, reminiscent of the school of the father of English book illustration, Randolph Caldecott himself, catapult the book gaily into an 18th-century mood, although the story itself is timeless, its implications timely, and the tripping music of its language ravishing.

Cole, a onetime philosophy professor, began creating picture books in the early 1980s. His first young adult novel, ''The Goats'' (1987), explored subtle issues of the essential nature of human beings and of the responsibilities of adults. This, and later ''Celine'' (1989), are among the few young people's novels apt to survive because they are written with elegance and concerned with human and humane issues that are endlessly discussable.

In ''Mouse Colors,'' Jim Arnosky, author-illustrator of a shelf of nature books, has created a tiny (51/2-by-61/2-inch) jeu d'esprit, an introduction to primary red, blue, and yellow, demonstrating what happens when those colors mix. A diminutive mouse swipes a double-mouse-size brush across the pages, creating her own blue water, her golden sun, and the very red-green-orange-purple boat in which she'll escape out of her own book. This is a good color lesson, as well as a solipsistic joke. Arnosky's companion book, ''Mouse Shapes,'' works similarly, but seems, somehow, less inevitable.

There is a subgenre of ostensible children's books that, if left lying about, will be picked up by any visiting adult - who'll be lost to the party for the evening. Such a book is Ian Redmond's ''The Elephants.'' Redmond's dedication to African wildlife conservation began a quarter of a century ago, when he served as assistant for Diane Fossey's work with gorillas. Even though trade in ivory has been banned internationally since 1989, the greed-fueled extirpation of the noble elephants with whom, for this moment, we share the earth continues. Redmond and Candlewick Press have cooperatively produced a book of heart-rending pictures - the great animal looking at us, ears in the wind like sails; the wise old eye, the cratered skin; the family playing in dust bath, wrestling in the mud, or ambling single file through the African night. Don't buy ivory, but raise a ruckus if you see it for sale; and buy this family book knowing that half its profits go to Elefriends, an organization working for the survival of these great beasts. Perhaps the book could be a companion gift to help allay the trauma of the first three pages of ''Babar, the Elephant'' (included in ''Bonjour, Babar!'').

Also timely, and striking in appearance, is James Rumford's rendering of the 75,000-mile, 29-year voyages of the 14th-century Moroccan-born scholar Ibn Battuta, whose Sinbad-esque travels took him from his own ''edge of the earth'' into the ''Ocean of Ignorance'' and to the golden worlds of Mecca, Delhi, the Maldives, across the steppes of Russia to the coastline of Tanzania, and back to Jerusalem, ''the center of the earth.'' ''Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354'' is lavishly illustrated, heavy on purple, heavier yet on gold, and illuminated with Rumford's own maps and striking calligraphy, reflecting (we're told) 14th-century orthography. The adventures that befall the narrator are exotic - his abduction by a bird, his capture by rebels, and the rise and decline of his fortunes in the courts. The verbal account, however, interrupting itself with sage homilies, tells more than it ''shows,'' and we agree with the narrator himself, who says that ''I could find no words to describe the beauty I saw.''

Different from any other books I know are Arthur Geisert's forays into the American heartland and his loopy digressions into a porcine parallel universe. Recognized as a significant contemporary etcher, Geisert has from his vantage of Galena, Ill., been working his 2,500-pound etching press to take us on simultaneously loving and homely travels across the United States. He has also thoroughly explored that illustrator's heaven, Noah's ark, examining minutely both the construction and the passengers. And for years he has been creating a deeply odd world of lean and long-legged pigs who can teach you the ABCs or your numbers, mind-boggling Roman numerals included. Just this year, there are two new Geisert beauties: ''Desert Town,'' done with Bonnie Geisert, and ''Nursery Crimes,'' by himself. As in the earlier ''Mountain Town, ''River Town,'' and ''Prairie Town,'' Geisert leads viewer-readers through the seasons of his small community, from baking summer heat, when all stay indoors, through a sandstorm, a heavy snowfall, and the quickening spring rains. From the dust jacket on, the desert town is firm, fixed, specific - we get to know it and its denizens, and we even can find its once-grand ''historical'' house, slyly displayed on cards and paintings in Geisert's gift store, though hidden in larger views of the town. And throughout, there are the little dramas - first, laundry on the line, then, laundry off the line, and then friends we think we recognize from earlier pictures - little puzzles that, in fact, are often the point of Geisert's piggy series in which you've continually got to keep trying to count, and account, for all the pigs.

''Nursery Crimes'' again sports the scratchy etchings, bent, hatched, and dappled into some archetypal Galena - colorful, detailed, specific, scenes and landscapes in which you can wander for a long time. The daffy mystery recounts the story of 12 little pigs, progeny of Jambonneau and Merville de Peru, who solve the crime of the theft of topiary turkeys into which the piggies sculpt their trees every fall. The narrative is fast, the suspense undiluted, the 12 boy and girl piggies, whom one also compulsively counts, are utterly odd - and the whole enterprise is original, unsentimental, straight-faced, and good-natured.

Ah - were there world enough and time, and a book review section of 100 pages - I would tell you of Beni Montresor's ''Hansel and Gretel.'' Montresor died in Verona in October at the age of 78. He was one of the great designers of opera sets and costumes, as well as illustrator of more than 30 years of children's books, including the Caldecott-winning pictures for Beatrice Schenk de Regniers's ''May I Bring a Friend'' (1965). Montresor's final book is a dignified bare-bones staging of Hansel and Gretel's grim story - told in blues, greens, oranges, ochers, and red silhouettes such as you have never seen before, the shapes of classic definition, the page design theatrical, and the colors jiving like a rite of spring.

Or I'd tell you about Jacques Taravant's ''The Little Wing Giver, '' published posthumously in the French newspaper Le Monde and now translated - and still sounding sweetly French, skirting sentimentality about as well as you may think Saint-Exupery's ''The Little Prince'' or Oscar Wilde's tales skirt it (not). Peter Sis's illustrations, ghosts, mountain peaks, angel wings, are ample reason to get or give the book.

Among the Christmas treasures for my grandson, Joseph, 5, and his mother, Amy, 42, I'm sending ''365 Super Science Experiments With Everyday Materials'' - for that's what they're doing these days, constructing parachutes, collapsing bottles, and making cereal puffs dance - and this one looks eminently practical, and you need neither a cyclotron nor a home grommet grinder.

Peter F. Neumeyer is a reviewer of children's books living in California. He can be reached at

neum1400@aol.com.

This story ran on page E2 of the Boston Globe on 12/2/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.