ECLECTIC AND SCANDALOUS, this spring is budding out strange. A skunk squats in the doghouse, claiming bed and breakfast; a raccoon has clawed its way up to the barn`s highest rafters, ousting pigeons and chipmunks from their accustomed aeries; my daughter Gabrielle`s knee is afflicted with something called, as nearly as I can spell it, Osgood`s schlatters; and I`m dreaming of glossy black parrots, all named Mrs. Striker. No wonder I have welcomed the chance to regress into a stack of children`s books, tossing a few to Gabrielle to distract her from the woes of her gimpy knee. At least, I discovered, we do not have ogres spilling from our beds or mutinous art or) the lain from its frames -yet. For every omniscient parent trapped in the fatiguing yet sometimes oddly comforting delusion that we must provide the ongoing mind our capricious kids appear to lack, and for every kid bent on having only one head (preferably her own) on her shoulders, here comes Warner, Don`t Forget (Scholastic, 22 pages, $4.95 paper). The setf-possessed Warner takes his mother`s accumulating admonitions in stride: "I am six years old, you know." The artist, Linda Hendry, accompanies the plot of the first-time authors Geraldine Mabin and Lynn Seligman with visual solutions to the puzzle of why, during a class trip to the zoo, various strangers and even a tree oddly echo Warner`s mother. Hendry`s illustrations are colourful and jumbly in a most congenial way. Using soft lines, colours, and rounded forms she describes her tumble of humans, trees, and beasts as not too distant relatives of overstuffed chairs: the book is a visual comfort zone. Astutely observant, Warner pulls the plug on his mother`s intrigue and - hurrah! -- the kid comes out on top. John F. Green has teamed up with the illustrator Maryann Kovalski to create Alice and the Birthday Giant (Scholastic, 40 pages, $4.95 paper). Beware of its opening doors: things loom large behind the closed portals of closets and bedrooms, a fact to which any child will at least privately attest. Having wished for "something very big" to make her birthday special, Alice finds a polo-shirted cyclops sprawled across her bed. Of course, the adults seek to trap, exterminate, or study this well-intentioned ogre, but Alice and her one ally, a witchy librarian, finally succeed in whisking him back to whence he came, presumably his lair in the wilds of Kovalski`s pastel brush. Kovalski delights in strewing action across a page until the nouns and verbs of the text achieve an appropriately hectic blur. More vibrant hues blossom in Just One More Colour (Annick, 24 pages, $14.95 cloth, $4.95 paper), a collaboration between the author Brenda Silsbe and the illustrator Shawn Steffler. An elderly Mr. Hall, colour enthusiast, grasps at each new seasonal colour spangling his acreage and slaps it frenetically on his new house, at the same time as Mother Nature subtracts it from her palette and squeezes out her newest display. The pink of apple blossoms gives way to dandelion`s gold, and when wind takes the dandelions, Mr. Hall paints his house in honour of his brown-and-white dog - -- which promptly leaves home. A bevy of neighbouring kids attends his frenzy until autumn, when ardent Mr. Hall suffers a nervous breakdown as his forest explodes all its buckets of colour at once. For the kids, of course, this is all joy, and they nurse him through to spring when the purple of a crocus catches his eye. Silsbe`s open-ended story pairs well with Steffler`s full palette, which, for a colourmonger like myself, feeds the soul. Since my daughter learned early to chatter for hours with fantasy interlocutors (she`s an only child), I picked up H. J. Hutchins`s Katie`s Babbling Brother (Annick, 24 pages, $14.95 cloth, $4.95 paper) with keen interest. Katie loves her baby brother dearly except for his 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. marathon orations of "Gagarumph iggle de snorkum zots!" Exasperated, she retrieves some magic sugar powder from the corner grocer, who guarantees it will "make the problem a lot smaller." It does, quite literally. Having indulged a wishful fantasy, Katie and her morn finally opt for less dire solutions to the unnerving tide of "sisbah yup yups" and, as best friends, grab quiet time together while waiting for Norman to grow up. Ruth Ohi`s illustrations are fun an, deftly complementing the text without being obtrusive. In developing their tender egos, kids -- and turtles - sometimes engage in hollow boasts, which they`re then called on to prove. For the turtle`s Late, Paulette Bourgeois offers us her third Franklin picture book, Franklin Fibs (Kids Can, 32 pages, $10.95 cloth). Franklin told his best friends he could swallow 76 flies in the blink of an eye and now feels as miserable as his friends are gleeful at the prospect of demonstrating his nonexistent ability. Bourgeois provides Franklin with wise parents who guide him without presuming to solve the problem for him. In commending him for the imagination he demonstrated in conniving his fib, they also encourage him to rise that same skill to find the solution to his dilemma. Kids Can`s accompanying press release commends the illustrator Brenda Clark for having Franklin "fairly glow with delight" when he solves his problem. In truth, Franklin glows throughout the book regardless of the emotional weather, although Clark does provide him and his comrades with a wide range of revealing facial expressions. Needless to say, a child might disagree. While Gabrielle, age nine, gave these primary-level books a brisk read-through with the blanket commendation of "Neat!" she read Kenneth Oppel`s Cosimo Cat (Scholastic, 24 pages, $12.95 cloth), which targets an audience aged five to eight, twice, resolving to some day acquire a cat like the mysterious Cosimo, (never mind the devoted duvet of four amassed on her lap). "I like the way the illustrator drew the cat," she asserted. On the contrary, I liked the way Regolo Ricci drew everything but the cat, which, amid his attentive realism (I love his Toronto subway bassoon player), seemed too cartoonlike with its immense eyes, But of course, Cosimo is from another realm. The protagonist, Rowan, has put on his homemade cat detector to find a neighbour`s lost pet. Skilfully negotiating suburbia and subways, he follows the cobalt-eyed fugitive to the museum, where she communes on a pedestal with a green-eyed Egyptian cat of stone before allowing Rowan to carry her home to her mistress and his reward: a kitten with one blue eye and one green. Oppel`s plot and Riccis illustrations are well integrated, and the subdued mystery that lures us to the tale`s end will doubtless bring young readers back to its charm more than once. For the upper end of this age group, however, I would welcome a bit more informative substance: Rowan`s intriguing cat detector apparently works, but we are never told the "how" of its construction or operation. And Ricci unforgivably omits Bast, the carheaded goddess, from his stone gallery of elegant, peering pharaohs. You might expect a 40-page book with 400 authors to be an anthology of one-liners. Not so Byron Through the Seasons (Fifth House, 40 pages, $14.95 cloth), the second in a series of Dene-English community story books written by the children of La Loche, Saskatchewan, with the help of numerous teachers, elders, and local advisers. Two years of labour are distilled in a simple tale (as told by Byron`s grandfather, Jonas) that recounts camp life in this northern land during the passage of the four seasons. Byron`s imaging of the tale as his grandfather speaks is painted with simple clarity by nine children. While the book`s intended readers, children eight to 10, might relish a more complex story, their enjoyment comes from knowing the book was made by, as well as for, their peers, as avidly proclaimed by my daughter. Four pages of supplementary information at the book`s end offer a concise explanation of Dene methods used, for example, to tan leather and preserve food, which balance the narrative`s spare structure. Perhaps because they were striving for verisimilitude, the children`s illustrations have little imaginative splash, but are carefully wrought detailings of Dene life. The values of community effort, rather than ego enterprise, enhance this series` presentation, providing a valuable model for our children to experience. Catherine Ross and Susan Wallace`s The Amazing Milk Book (Kids Can, 80 pages, $9.95 paper) was my daughters choice of the stack. Fifth in Kids Can`s "Amazing" series (they`ve already celebrated dirt, eggs, paper, and -apples), it already bears her chimney of scrap papers marking "must do" activities such as "Doi* just drink your milk. Write with it!" Ross and Wallace shape their data into a fascinating rhythm of fact and fun guaranteed to beguile even the lactose intolerant. Their avidity pushes them beyond bovines to include facts on bats (whose babies nurse upsidedown), blue whales (whose babies, nursing underwater, drink up to 132 gallons of milk per day) and, most happily, humans, putting us right there in the animal kingdom where we belong. Each entry is concise and captivating, and all are enhanced by Linda Hendry`s friendly and often comical illustrations. Many of the activities are edible, and thus make eating nutritiously a self-initiated, creative endeavour instead of reluctant acquiescence to parental All this investigative fun might even stir its readers - it did me to a moment of ingenuous astonishment before meals. And finally, my favourite. All ages will be captivated by Jan Mogensen`s 46 Little Men (Breakwater, 24 pages, $19.95 cloth). Avowedly visual, its 19 pages of lilliputian antics engaged in by rotund jellybeans in top hats are a clever, untiring stimulus to storytelling. One page of written text sets the stage: 46 little men escape from their residence in a picture on the nursery walls by means of rope and ladder, falling into a comic, tumbling journey through the nursery`s outsized landscape to the Island of Elves and back again. just enough who`s who is given to entice us into the story. On the book`s endpapers is drawn the cast of characters, which includes Parson Plump, Sleepy and his Two Pests, and The World`s Second Unluckiest Man. Thereafter the reader becomes a sleuthing viewer, tracking each character page by page through adventurous mishaps. 1 felt a tickle of feminist pique that in this saga the only women are cast as smiling, elfin butterflies uncritically dispensing food, entertainment, and affection to these winsome boobies. But as the caricature wreaks its hilarious havoc on both sexes, chuckles soon dislodged my grudge. For parents who find themselves climbing the nursery walls on rainy days, 46 Little Men might be just the troupe to restore goodhumoured sanity; even kids without reading skills can see this story to its end.