AN ADULT APPROACHING to children's books with the aim of reviewing their merits must do so with humility. Ones judgement, while relevant, is not sufficient. On the other hand, the practice of having child readers themselves pronounce upon books isn't wholly satisfactory either. In my experience, children say that nearly every book is "good"; a very few, they say, are "awesome" To see how the others affect a child, I watch. Really successful children's books are devoured avidly; it's as if the child is drinking the words right off the page. Kids talk about characters for months afterward. Another book will be laid down unfinished and forgotten. Still, say kids, it's a "good" book. I suspect there's a fair amount of this going on with adult books as well, but that's another story. None of the books I read this season will likely attain classic status. But there are some -- not necessarily the ones that I would have guessed -- with that combination of charm and resonance that means they stay awhile with a child. I chose to deal with books for children between six and 10 -- from the late picture-book era to the early novel stage, mostly because I have a seven- and a nine-year-old reader in the house. The Orphan Boy (Oxford University Press, 32 pages, $1595 cloth) is a retelling of a Masai myth by Tololwa Mollel, an African-born Edmonton writer, with breathtaking illustrations by the Calgary artist Paul Morin. The simple tale is sparely and elegantly told, and the paintings on fabric are reproduced in exquisite colour, catching the feel of night and day under a relentless sun and immense sky. Kileken, the orphan boy, appears in the night and is taken in by a lonely old man. The boy has unexplained powers, accomplishes chores in no time, and generally cares for the old man. The two live happily together until drought comes. The boy now reveals further powers: he takes the cattle out and brings them home with "their bellies bursting from good grazing" He explains to the old man that his father passed on to him a hidden power but that he could never reveal it. When the old man begs to be told, Kileken says, "A secret known to two is no secret ... you must never seek to know." The old man's temptation and its devastating results are as simple and profound as the myths of those other sun-dwellers, the Greeks. This story, with its glimpse of the glorious Masai culture and landscape, has a magical appeal. The wisdom and generosity of the child, and the punishment that can come from a vengeful earth, are messages it carries effortlessly. Poetry anthologies are books my children turn to often at home, especially my seven-year-old daughter. Here are two new ones: %ices on the Wind (Kids Can, 41 pages, $1495 cloth), edited by David Booth, with illustrations by Michele Lemieux, and dandelions & dreams (Moonstone, 75 pages, $895 paper), a much less lavish production by Leroy Gorman, with illustrations by Brenda Shelley Clark. I am a fan of David Booth's previous poetry anthology, and this one is just as attractive. It runs the gamut from poems by Chief Dan George to William Blake to Beatrix Potter. These poems are linked by the themes of nature and the seasons, and emphasize rhyme and nursery rhythms, for instance in Margaret Hillert's The winds of March are sleeping I hardly felt a thing The trees were standing quietly It didn't seem like spring Children will be soothed and pleased by the poems' musicality and the sentiments expressed. But there are few new ideas or challenges in this anthology. I also wonder if the eco-orthodoxy that now pervades classrooms will result in kids who are oversaturated with nature. Gormans dandelions and dreams is quite different. At first I thought it would he beyond my daughter Emily, with its word play, letters dripping down like wax at the end of lines, and funny typographical hitches in the language. But I left her alone with the book and she came back often to show me her discoveries. One was my grandmother's nearly blind as she counts change by the window to order a loaf of bread before the store closes she finds enough sunshine to tell a penny from a dime Emily told me the book was "good." (Of course.) Why was it good? She showed me another poem, called "Why did you leave, Daddy?" This poem deals with -- I hate the phrase "deals with" when referring to children's books. It usually means that it is a sociological tract of some sort. But this isn't. Daddy has apparently bought another house, and the speaker wants to know why, and if it will be delivered, and what he will do with it, and finally, why he left. Emily liked it "because it's all questions." There are no question marks in the poem, however. This is one of its charms, to her. She read the introduction, which pointed out that the author sometimes leaves out periods, too! She had other favourite poems in this book, one that mentioned spaghetti, and another called "Teaching the Kitten to Swim." The latter is a somewhat chilling poem of a few lines, wherein a kitten is held underwater to drown. It ends with "it didn't, Dad." My young reader immediately grasped the story underneath, and liked it, "even though its, sad" This poetry written for children, but not at children, is a good example of something unexpected working well. It has interest for adults, too a book we'll go back to often. In the tract category we might place Eliza's Best Wednesday (Kids Can, 61 pages, $5.95 paper), by Catherine Lalonde and Louise Burchell, with drawings by Carol Sargent. This book seeks to redress the lamentable fact that "most kids know the Little House on the Prairie series but they don't know much about the Canadian experience." I couldn't agree more that this is a problem. I think, however, that Eliza's Best Wednesday is only a partial solution. This is one of those books that make me truly uncomfortable: more social studies than story, but packaged as a novel. Packed with historically accurate and even interesting details (the two authors worked for nearly a decade at Upper Canada Village), the book tries to get off the ground dramatically by letting us in on 10-year-old Eliza's excitement about entering her butter in competition at an 1860 annual agricultural exhibition. Eliza goes with her family and meets a phrenologist, a Yankee, and even a drunk before she sees her father's horses win first place. The book could be a useful teacher's aid in a section on pioneer life for the early grades, and ought to be in wide circulation, but Little House on the Prairie it is not. Whatever you may think of Laura Ingalls Wilder, her books are emotionally captivating; my son galloped through them, reading in bed against orders because he couldn't stop. To convey the drama of early Canadian life we need a true fiction writer who has story and character uppermost in her mind, not a burden of historical fact. I think we make a serious mistake when we attempt to give children lessons passed off as fiction -- we destroy both the purity of factual information and the wonder of fiction. A more lavishly produced and altogether more successful, unabashedly non-fiction book is Houses of Bark: Tipi, Wigwam and Longhouse (Tundra, 24 pages, $12.95 cloth), by Bonnie Shemie. This is the second in a series that began with Houses of Snow, Skin and Bones. It is as direct and beautifully designed a book as one could wish on this timely and fascinating subject. Neatly divided into sections that are easy for a child to follow, with some black-and-white and some colour illustrations, this book will be looked at for schoolwork, and turned to again out of sheer interest. It is simply and respectfully written without being mawkish, and emphasizes the family and community participation in housing by native peoples. It will surely spark conversation and further readings on the subject. For slightly younger readers we have Robert Munsch's latest, Good Families Don't (Doubleday, 32 pages, $5.95 paper), and Richard Thompson's Jesse on the Night Train (Annick, unpaginated, $14.95 cloth, $4.95 paper). The latter is another Jesse adventure. I confess to being a complete sucker for Richard Thompson. He's a natural writer with burnout and love shining through every word of his tales. Thompson is well paired with the illustrator Eugenie Fernandes and her slightly off-kilter, exuberant pictures. This time Jesse is going across the country by train. She is sleeping in the top bunk with her mother when she wakes up with a question: "Mom, who's driving this train?" Haven't most of us done that? But we are not the intrepid Jesse, who can see things, and teach other people to see them too. In this story she finds someone to share her midnight visions. "There's a moose out there," she said to the engineer. "There's a whole herd of moose out there, and they're dancing" "Yes," said the engineer. "They are dancing to the music of their moose horns. Listen." She also sees a herd of wolves, and gets them off the track by throwing a chicken leg out the window. Jesse is great, and I'd read any numbers of books about her. I wish Thompson would grow her up a little and write for older children, whose more functional outlook could use an injection of her sense of wonder and her resourcefulness, if not her impudence. Munsch's Good Families Doi*, with art by Alan Daniel, was famous in advance of publication because of a few wellpublicized protests about its content. This time it is not God as a little girl that has angered educators, but the fact that a fart is the hero. Yes, a fart. Ask my kids. "It's about a fart," says Robin, "and that's rude" "Don't even write about it, Mom," says Emily. "It's not that rude. What else is it like?" I ask. "It's a silly story," says Robin. "And?" "Well, if it wasn't about a fart it would be the same as all his other books." I couldn't agree more. The formula that worked so well in Munsch's The Mud Puddle and The Dark is in operation again. Something scary -- or unmentionable -- is made into a living thing, not exactly personified, but monsterized, and shows remarkable persistence, showing up again and again despite the best efforts of a child, or the police, or a parent. Then someone -- usually the child -- tackles it head on, wrestles it to the ground or frightens it off, in this case with a rose, and it is vanquished. There is a message here, and it isn't just about farts. If good families do have farts, and good Canadians do have farts ("What would the Americans think?"), as apparently they do, then what else do they have? We shudder to think. For a good grade one or two reader, Andrew and the Wild Bikes (Annick, 32 pages, $12.95 cloth, $4.95 paper), by Allen Morgan, is a slight story about a boy who discovers a herd of wild bikes in the ravine, and tames one. A clever idea, indifferently told, and adequately illustrated by Steve Berniecke. It's a onceover read, which produced the usual "It was good." At the same level, Grandfather Christmas (Breakwater, 32 pages, $14.95 cloth), by Brian Pilkington, is a delightful book with sly burnout in both text and pictures. It tells the story of Harry, a department-store Santa, and his troubles with employment in the off-season. He is a man of many talents, but always hindered by his long white beard. The language is gently varied and free of cliche, just writerly enough to notice. The pictures are full of little gags and problems. A charming book, for those old enough to have given up believing in Santa. Finally, moving away from picture-books to novels, I found three this season for those 10 and under. Jennie Nelson's Archibald and the Crunch Machine (Annick, 40 pages, $5.95 paper) is a realistic eco-fable by an author living in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The problem in this book is another bad smell, the cause of which is undetermined, and for relief from which the prime minister is giving out nose plugs. (That is the part Emily and Robin liked best. Politics is not lost on the young.) Enter Archibald, complete with his crunch machine. It's a fine story, compactly and neatly told, which both my children read and enjoyed. Am I being churlish in resenting the heavy environmental message, together with instructions for environmental action worked into the final two pages of the story? Recycling shopping bags and composting are now cliches for children under 10, thanks to the messages laid on at school. It doesn't really spoil the story, and I suppose it can't be bad, but it seems a trifle predictable? opportunistic? that this is the arena in which Archibald achieves herodom again. Drawings are by Sarah Battersby. I Spent my Summer Vacation Kidnapped into Space (Scholastic, 144 pages, $3.50 paper), by Martyn Godfrey, is science fiction set in Texas, where two kids graduating from grade six sign out an Academy shuttle and go off-world. There follows a speedily paced action story where the boys are captured and put in a cage, threatened with shooting, bash a nanny over the head, and so forth, heading home to discover that their parents have held a memorial service for them, thinking they were frozen in orbit. This book is fun, and allows the reader to easily absorb concepts of space technology through the kids' glib use of space language. Robin sped through it, and declared it to be good, but he said it didn't tell much about the kids, not even their ages. Perhaps surprisingly, he preferred Ida Mae Evans Eats Ants (McClelland & Stewart, 128 pages, $9.95 paper), by Mary Blakeslee. I say surprisingly because it is about a girt, which he is not, and it isn't full of princesses and people called Rothgar the Terrible or Gam. Instead it is about a new girl in school called Ida Mae Evans, and how she learns to fit in at a new school in a new city. Ida Mae is a free spirit. She has been in a progressive school. She uses words like "archaic," but when she comes to East Lake Middle School she has to go into the remedial class. She has a Great Aunt Glory who wears a pink muu- muu and shouts out things like "Who goes there?" in the house. Fortunately for Ida, and for readers, she is surrounded by engaging characters who are somewhat out of the ordinary, but living very ordinary lives. When she paints a "surrealistic" painting of a woman getting out of bed, it is labelled "PUDDLE" by a critic. Robin said he liked the names in it -- the mother is called Autumn, the brother Emmanuel, and Ida Mae was named after a rich aunt who unfortunately did not leave her a lot of money. The names are good, and so are the casual observations about the people who own them. It is a witty book, with the fun being mostly in the language and the ideas -- there are chuckles here for parents, but not exclusively for them. Dyslexic Erika, for example, wants to write the first great international novel -- no doubt she has heard about what happened to those who wrote the great Canadian novel. AN ADULT APPROACHING to children's books with the aim of reviewing their merits must do so with humility. Ones judgement, while relevant, is not sufficient. On the other hand, the practice of having child readers themselves pronounce upon books isn't wholly satisfactory either. In my experience, children say that nearly every book is "good"; a very few, they say, are "awesome" To see how the others affect a child, I watch. Really successful children's books are devoured avidly; it's as if the child is drinking the words right off the page. Kids talk about characters for months afterward. Another book will be laid down unfinished and forgotten. Still, say kids, it's a "good" book. I suspect there's a fair amount of this going on with adult books as well, but that's another story. None of the books I read this season will likely attain classic status. But there are some -- not necessarily the ones that I would have guessed -- with that combination of charm and resonance that means they stay awhile with a child. I chose to deal with books for children between six and 10 -- from the late picture-book era to the early novel stage, mostly because I have a seven- and a nine-year-old reader in the house. The Orphan Boy (Oxford University Press, 32 pages, $1595 cloth) is a retelling of a Masai myth by Tololwa Mollel, an African-born Edmonton writer, with breathtaking illustrations by the Calgary artist Paul Morin. The simple tale is sparely and elegantly told, and the paintings on fabric are reproduced in exquisite colour, catching the feel of night and day under a relentless sun and immense sky. Kileken, the orphan boy, appears in the night and is taken in by a lonely old man. The boy has unexplained powers, accomplishes chores in no time, and generally cares for the old man. The two live happily together until drought comes. The boy now reveals further powers: he takes the cattle out and brings them home with "their bellies bursting from good grazing" He explains to the old man that his father passed on to him a hidden power but that he could never reveal it. When the old man begs to be told, Kileken says, "A secret known to two is no secret ... you must never seek to know." The old man's temptation and its devastating results are as simple and profound as the myths of those other sun-dwellers, the Greeks. This story, with its glimpse of the glorious Masai culture and landscape, has a magical appeal. The wisdom and generosity of the child, and the punishment that can come from a vengeful earth, are messages it carries effortlessly. Poetry anthologies are books my children turn to often at home, especially my seven-year-old daughter. Here are two new ones: %ices on the Wind (Kids Can, 41 pages, $1495 cloth), edited by David Booth, with illustrations by Michele Lemieux, and dandelions & dreams (Moonstone, 75 pages, $895 paper), a much less lavish production by Leroy Gorman, with illustrations by Brenda Shelley Clark. I am a fan of David Booth's previous poetry anthology, and this one is just as attractive. It runs the gamut from poems by Chief Dan George to William Blake to Beatrix Potter. These poems are linked by the themes of nature and the seasons, and emphasize rhyme and nursery rhythms, for instance in Margaret Hillert's The winds of March are sleeping I hardly felt a thing The trees were standing quietly It didn't seem like spring Children will be soothed and pleased by the poems' musicality and the sentiments expressed. But there are few new ideas or challenges in this anthology. I also wonder if the eco-orthodoxy that now pervades classrooms will result in kids who are oversaturated with nature. Gormans dandelions and dreams is quite different. At first I thought it would he beyond my daughter Emily, with its word play, letters dripping down like wax at the end of lines, and funny typographical hitches in the language. But I left her alone with the book and she came back often to show me her discoveries. One was my grandmother's nearly blind as she counts change by the window to order a loaf of bread before the store closes she finds enough sunshine to tell a penny from a dime Emily told me the book was "good." (Of course.) Why was it good? She showed me another poem, called "Why did you leave, Daddy?" This poem deals with -- I hate the phrase "deals with" when referring to children's books. It usually means that it is a sociological tract of some sort. But this isn't. Daddy has apparently bought another house, and the speaker wants to know why, and if it will be delivered, and what he will do with it, and finally, why he left. Emily liked it "because it's all questions." There are no question marks in the poem, however. This is one of its charms, to her. She read the introduction, which pointed out that the author sometimes leaves out periods, too! She had other favourite poems in this book, one that mentioned spaghetti, and another called "Teaching the Kitten to Swim." The latter is a somewhat chilling poem of a few lines, wherein a kitten is held underwater to drown. It ends with "it didn't, Dad." My young reader immediately grasped the story underneath, and liked it, "even though its, sad" This poetry written for children, but not at children, is a good example of something unexpected working well. It has interest for adults, too a book we'll go back to often. In the tract category we might place Eliza's Best Wednesday (Kids Can, 61 pages, $5.95 paper), by Catherine Lalonde and Louise Burchell, with drawings by Carol Sargent. This book seeks to redress the lamentable fact that "most kids know the Little House on the Prairie series but they don't know much about the Canadian experience." I couldn't agree more that this is a problem. I think, however, that Eliza's Best Wednesday is only a partial solution. This is one of those books that make me truly uncomfortable: more social studies than story, but packaged as a novel. Packed with historically accurate and even interesting details (the two authors worked for nearly a decade at Upper Canada Village), the book tries to get off the ground dramatically by letting us in on 10-year-old Eliza's excitement about entering her butter in competition at an 1860 annual agricultural exhibition. Eliza goes with her family and meets a phrenologist, a Yankee, and even a drunk before she sees her father's horses win first place. The book could be a useful teacher's aid in a section on pioneer life for the early grades, and ought to be in wide circulation, but Little House on the Prairie it is not. Whatever you may think of Laura Ingalls Wilder, her books are emotionally captivating; my son galloped through them, reading in bed against orders because he couldn't stop. To convey the drama of early Canadian life we need a true fiction writer who has story and character uppermost in her mind, not a burden of historical fact. I think we make a serious mistake when we attempt to give children lessons passed off as fiction -- we destroy both the purity of factual information and the wonder of fiction. A more lavishly produced and altogether more successful, unabashedly non-fiction book is Houses of Bark: Tipi, Wigwam and Longhouse (Tundra, 24 pages, $12.95 cloth), by Bonnie Shemie. This is the second in a series that began with Houses of Snow, Skin and Bones. It is as direct and beautifully designed a book as one could wish on this timely and fascinating subject. Neatly divided into sections that are easy for a child to follow, with some black-and-white and some colour illustrations, this book will be looked at for schoolwork, and turned to again out of sheer interest. It is simply and respectfully written without being mawkish, and emphasizes the family and community participation in housing by native peoples. It will surely spark conversation and further readings on the subject. For slightly younger readers we have Robert Munsch's latest, Good Families Don't (Doubleday, 32 pages, $5.95 paper), and Richard Thompson's Jesse on the Night Train (Annick, unpaginated, $14.95 cloth, $4.95 paper). The latter is another Jesse adventure. I confess to being a complete sucker for Richard Thompson. He's a natural writer with burnout and love shining through every word of his tales. Thompson is well paired with the illustrator Eugenie Fernandes and her slightly off-kilter, exuberant pictures. This time Jesse is going across the country by train. She is sleeping in the top bunk with her mother when she wakes up with a question: "Mom, who's driving this train?" Haven't most of us done that? But we are not the intrepid Jesse, who can see things, and teach other people to see them too. In this story she finds someone to share her midnight visions. "There's a moose out there," she said to the engineer. "There's a whole herd of moose out there, and they're dancing" "Yes," said the engineer. "They are dancing to the music of their moose horns. Listen." She also sees a herd of wolves, and gets them off the track by throwing a chicken leg out the window. Jesse is great, and I'd read any numbers of books about her. I wish Thompson would grow her up a little and write for older children, whose more functional outlook could use an injection of her sense of wonder and her resourcefulness, if not her impudence. Munsch's Good Families Doi*, with art by Alan Daniel, was famous in advance of publication because of a few wellpublicized protests about its content. This time it is not God as a little girl that has angered educators, but the fact that a fart is the hero. Yes, a fart. Ask my kids. "It's about a fart," says Robin, "and that's rude" "Don't even write about it, Mom," says Emily. "It's not that rude. What else is it like?" I ask. "It's a silly story," says Robin. "And?" "Well, if it wasn't about a fart it would be the same as all his other books." I couldn't agree more. The formula that worked so well in Munsch's The Mud Puddle and The Dark is in operation again. Something scary -- or unmentionable -- is made into a living thing, not exactly personified, but monsterized, and shows remarkable persistence, showing up again and again despite the best efforts of a child, or the police, or a parent. Then someone -- usually the child -- tackles it head on, wrestles it to the ground or frightens it off, in this case with a rose, and it is vanquished. There is a message here, and it isn't just about farts. If good families do have farts, and good Canadians do have farts ("What would the Americans think?"), as apparently they do, then what else do they have? We shudder to think. For a good grade one or two reader, Andrew and the Wild Bikes (Annick, 32 pages, $12.95 cloth, $4.95 paper), by Allen Morgan, is a slight story about a boy who discovers a herd of wild bikes in the ravine, and tames one. A clever idea, indifferently told, and adequately illustrated by Steve Berniecke. It's a onceover read, which produced the usual "It was good." At the same level, Grandfather Christmas (Breakwater, 32 pages, $14.95 cloth), by Brian Pilkington, is a delightful book with sly burnout in both text and pictures. It tells the story of Harry, a department-store Santa, and his troubles with employment in the off-season. He is a man of many talents, but always hindered by his long white beard. The language is gently varied and free of cliche, just writerly enough to notice. The pictures are full of little gags and problems. A charming book, for those old enough to have given up believing in Santa. Finally, moving away from picture-books to novels, I found three this season for those 10 and under. Jennie Nelson's Archibald and the Crunch Machine (Annick, 40 pages, $5.95 paper) is a realistic eco-fable by an author living in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The problem in this book is another bad smell, the cause of which is undetermined, and for relief from which the prime minister is giving out nose plugs. (That is the part Emily and Robin liked best. Politics is not lost on the young.) Enter Archibald, complete with his crunch machine. It's a fine story, compactly and neatly told, which both my children read and enjoyed. Am I being churlish in resenting the heavy environmental message, together with instructions for environmental action worked into the final two pages of the story? Recycling shopping bags and composting are now cliches for children under 10, thanks to the messages laid on at school. It doesn't really spoil the story, and I suppose it can't be bad, but it seems a trifle predictable? opportunistic? that this is the arena in which Archibald achieves herodom again. Drawings are by Sarah Battersby. I Spent my Summer Vacation Kidnapped into Space (Scholastic, 144 pages, $3.50 paper), by Martyn Godfrey, is science fiction set in Texas, where two kids graduating from grade six sign out an Academy shuttle and go off-world. There follows a speedily paced action story where the boys are captured and put in a cage, threatened with shooting, bash a nanny over the head, and so forth, heading home to discover that their parents have held a memorial service for them, thinking they were frozen in orbit. This book is fun, and allows the reader to easily absorb concepts of space technology through the kids' glib use of space language. Robin sped through it, and declared it to be good, but he said it didn't tell much about the kids, not even their ages. Perhaps surprisingly, he preferred Ida Mae Evans Eats Ants (McClelland & Stewart, 128 pages, $9.95 paper), by Mary Blakeslee. I say surprisingly because it is about a girt, which he is not, and it isn't full of princesses and people called Rothgar the Terrible or Gam. Instead it is about a new girl in school called Ida Mae Evans, and how she learns to fit in at a new school in a new city. Ida Mae is a free spirit. She has been in a progressive school. She uses words like "archaic," but when she comes to East Lake Middle School she has to go into the remedial class. She has a Great Aunt Glory who wears a pink muu- muu and shouts out things like "Who goes there?" in the house. Fortunately for Ida, and for readers, she is surrounded by engaging characters who are somewhat out of the ordinary, but living very ordinary lives. When she paints a "surrealistic" painting of a woman getting out of bed, it is labelled "PUDDLE" by a critic. Robin said he liked the names in it -- the mother is called Autumn, the brother Emmanuel, and Ida Mae was named after a rich aunt who unfortunately did not leave her a lot of money. The names are good, and so are the casual observations about the people who own them. It is a witty book, with the fun being mostly in the language and the ideas -- there are chuckles here for parents, but not exclusively for them. Dyslexic Erika, for example, wants to write the first great international novel -- no doubt she has heard about what happened to those who wrote the great Canadian novel. But it is the characters, their predicaments, and their feelings that a child responds to in this book. Apparently this is more exciting than adventures in space, or so Robin says, "because of the kids." Ida Mae is, dare I say it, a "good book," and one that gets splayed out on the sofa, and then the floor, and then the bed, until it's read through, right to the end. But it is the characters, their predicaments, and their feelings that a child responds to in this book. Apparently this is more exciting than adventures in space, or so Robin says, "because of the kids." Ida Mae is, dare I say it, a "good book," and one that gets splayed out on the sofa, and then the floor, and then the bed, until it's read through, right to the end.