Inspired takes on the living world
Spring Is Here
By Lois Lenski
Random House, 56 pp., ages 3-6, $9.95
A Mouse in a Meadow
By John Himmelman
Charlesbridge, 32 pp., ages 4-7, $15.95
Moon
Written by Steve Tomecek
Illustrated by Liisa Chauncy Guida
National Geographic, 32 pp., ages 4-8, $16.95
March roared in like a lion, full of snow and bluster, and it still seems incredible, at times, that spring officially begins March 20. But spring makes believers of us all, and so here are some books for children and their exhausted parents, with promises of flowers, kites, mice, and meadows.
Lois Lenski wrote and illustrated more than 90 books for children, working from the 1920s through to the 1960s, always in her own distinctive style, producing everything from songs to picture books to novels. She won the Newbery Medal for her book ''Strawberry Girl," and her plain, almost-clunky-yet-elegant illustrations still grace the pages of the popular ''Betsy-Tacy" series. (I have the full set myself.) ''Spring Is Here" is a spring-green, hand-size book that was first issued 60 years ago and, to quote the publishers, is now ''gently recolored" in its new edition. Our taste in picture books has grown gaudier in the intervening years, like our taste for ever-spicier foods; hence the new colors appear both brighter and more various. Still, there is that quintessential '30s-40s quality to ''Spring Is Here," from the ''prancing" milkman's horse to the vintage-era children's clothing, from the stiff and sprightly figures to Lenski's unabashed use (and occasional airy discarding) of rhymes: ''The warm south wind is blowing,/Sister's hair is flowing,/Brother's hat is going -- Spring is here today." The book is old-fashioned in many regards but in other ways tastes as fresh as the season's first strawberry. Children may dress and wear their hair differently, but they still play hopscotch and fly kites in the March winds; they are still first to believe that ''spring has come to stay!"
John Himmelman's ''A Mouse in a Meadow" provides a much-needed something for very young nature lovers -- namely, a naturalist's guide for the picture-book crowd. ''A Mouse in a Meadow" tells children what they might find in a meadow, if they learn to look hard enough, and tells them about it in clear, unsentimental language, as we see in these three pages of the book: ''The snake startles a moth, who flies away./ The moth lands in a spider's web./A meadowlark beats her to it. No meal for the spider." Each page has only a line or two of prose, and the story flitters, leaps, and flies forward from creature to creature, plant to plant, page to page.
Himmelman's watercolors echo the clear, bright tints one sees in classic botanical prints but are rendered a bit simpler and bolder, to appeal to young eyes. Most wonderful of all, the back of the book provides a basic field guide to each plant and animal, dividing them into different kinds and species, and makes a game of finding them again in the pages of the book. This is a book that certain kinds of children will read over and over again: those who love to play in the wild, those who love to observe things closely, and those who like to play hide-and-seek games in their books. One hopes Himmelman will continue with other natural environments. There's a great wild world out there for small children to explore -- and ''A Mouse in a Meadow" is a wonderful place to begin.
Spring draws us outside again, and we may find ourselves some evening gazing up at a mild spring moon. If we do, Steve Tomecek's ''Moon," illustrated by Liisa Chauncy Guida, will provide a clear and child-friendly guide to what we are looking at. ''The moon is made of rock and gets its heat and light from the hot glowing gases of the sun. If the sun didn't shine on the moon, we wouldn't be able to see it." Even I can understand that.
Like ''A Mouse in a Meadow," ''Moon" fills that long-standing gap between baby books and the older child's typical nonfiction book -- many words, few and uninspired pictures. ''Moon" turns all that on its head, telling a great deal in relatively few words, and the text accompanied on each page by big, busy, glowing, comical pictures.
We read how Galileo looked through his telescope to discover that the moon looks very much like our Earth. But Tomecek also reminds us of some of the differences: ''Unlike the Earth, the moon has no running water." It's a quarter of the size of the Earth, and the near little thing takes a little more than 27 days to orbit around us, while we take a year to orbit the distant sun. Author Tomecek provides the clear and simple facts, and illustrator Guida provides the whimsy, with a cheerful catlike creature acting as our guide in the full-color, full-page pictures, which possess those lush colorings seldom found in nonfiction books. It's a brilliant idea, to make nonfiction more like the picture book for the very young, and to allow the picture book to stretch into a realm that used to be deemed too dense or too dull for the very young. The living world of course is neither dense nor dull -- least of all to children, who still spare the time to look up now and again at the sky.
Liz Rosenberg's newest book for young readers is ''I Just Hope It's Lethal: Poems of Madness, Sadness and Joy," co-edited with Deena November and due out this fall from Houghton Mifflin. She teaches literature and creative writing at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
