Picture-perfect new storybooks brim with magic

By Liz Rosenberg, 9/14/2003

When Everybody Wore a Hat, By William Steig, HarperCollins, ages 7-10, 40 pp., $17.99

The SHape Game, By Anthony Browne, Farrar Straus & Giroux, ages 5-10, 32 pp., $16

The Dragon Machine, By Helen Ward, Dutton Books, ages 5-10, $15.99

"When Everybody Wore a Hat" is the newest picture book from the invincible William Steig, author of, among other award winners, "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" and "Doctor DeSoto." It begins, "In 1916, when I was eight years old, there were almost no electric lights, cars or telephones -- and definitely no TV. Facing that page is a black-and-white photo of the young Steig clinging to a tree. Turn the page, and you find yourself in the Steig cartoon universe. Steig's art is reminiscent of early German expressionists; faces and gestures rage with emotions, while the scenes remain doggedly domestic, and contrast is key to Steig's humor. His prose and pictures play straight man and comic. "When there wasn't enough heat, Pop even fought with the radiator." The sentence is mild, the lunatic father wielding the hammer anything but.

While magic plays a role in many of Steig's children's books, "When Everybody Wore a Hat" conjures a real time, nearly a century ago, that seems magical now in its very ordinariness. How better to teach history? "There was no such thing as a hatless human being. Cops had hats. Even monkeys." Or consider the value of a nickel, perhaps the dullest of American coins: "For a nickel you could get a lot: a hot dog sandwich from a stand. A pound of fruit. A movie. And two movies if you sat in the same seat."

"When Everybody Wore a Hat" recalls a lost world of dogs and moving men, neighbors, and Marian Mack, the prettiest girl on the block. Steig doesn't sugarcoat memory -- there are sad times, hard times, World War I, and the Spanish influenza. The book ends with a recent black-and-white photo of the author and artist, who wanted to be an artist or a seaman when he grew up. Steig is grinning, which suggests he made the right choice.

Anthony Browne's "The Shape Game" is another picture-book type of memoir -- a fable-like story of the artist as a young boy. While Browne appears to be telling the story of a young boy taken to an art museum and learning to appreciate art, he remains the authentic author/illustrator that has made him beloved in great children's books "Gorilla."

Browne's best works all have an eerie, otherworldly quality. In "The Shape Game," the "really fancy" art museum looks like a cross between a castle and a prison, and a lion runs loose down its halls. Initially, neither the father nor the two boys want to be there -- the mother has dragged them along on her birthday. But little by little, through games of observation and imagination, both the young narrator and the reader are drawn in. Brown plants visual jokes and nuances throughout the book, from hidden sausages to showing the family first in drab sepia tones and then, as they warm to the museum, adding in color bit by bit. "The Shape Game" is an ingenious introduction to art, an homage to memory and a child's engagement with the world of colored pencils and paper.

Dragons are powerful totems of imagination, otherworldly beings who escape logic and gravity. In Helen Ward's beautiful, odd new picture book, "The Dragon Machine," we learn that "George noticed his first real dragon on a rainy Thursday." Dragons are everywhere, "ignored and overlooked, the dragons went unnoticed, just like George." George finds a map that says "here be dragons" and sets off, in a "lumbering," flying dragon machine of his own invention, to lead them home. Ward's clear prose

enhances "The Dragon Machine," as does Wayne Anderson's exquisite illustrations, full of little dragon details and lush with a bright palette of blues and greens and sparks of red. "The Dragon Machine" is all about the interface between reality and imagination, and its end finds a solution where the two can peaceably coexist.

"Where I'd Like To Be" by Frances O'Roark Dowell also concerns itself with imagination and reality. Because it is a novel, rather than a picture book, it touches on these themes from several angles. Maddie is the 11-year-old heroine and narrator who lives in the East Tennessee Children's Home. "There wasn't much chance anyone was going to adopt an eleven-year-old as plain Jane as me. I was just waiting out the years till I could pack my bags and move onto a house of my own." She has learned to survive through good times and bad with her persistent sense of humor, one or two precious friendships, and her "book of houses" (dream houses she clips from magazines and newspapers).

When a new girl, Murphy, enters the children's home, full of stories of fabulous places she has lived, she, Maddie, and a few other children from the home band together to build an actual house -- a fort of dreams -- in the backyard of a local boy who needs a sense of belonging as much as they do. "Where I'd Like To Be" is by turns funny and tragic, always convincing, often lyrical: "Her voice drifted across the dark valley between our beds." I heard the audio version, but read or heard, "Where I'd Like To Be" is one of those rare novels for young readers that adds to our understanding of the world, where mothers are a sensitive topic, and dreams allow children to survive.

Liz Rosenberg reviews children's books monthly for the Globe.