FOR PETE’S SAKE
By Ellen Stoll Walsh
Harcourt Brace (ages 3-7), $15
Pete is an alligator whose friends are flamingos, and Ellen Stoll Walsh’s cut-paper collages make you feel the differences between them. There aren’t many pink alligators, as even the youngest children listening to the story will know. Another thing they’ll realize is just what good friends those flamingos are, reassuring Pete that everything he sees as a difference is actually an asset. Four feet? ” `You’re lucky,’ ” they tell him. ” `Two, and two extra.’ “
When Pete does feel lucky, he does have fun, gleefully leaping into the water from the sandy beach (represented with different shades of handmade paper in layers). Still, it’s tough when the flamingos hurry home at a pace Pete can’t match. One day some other alligators — “Flamingos who looked just like Pete” — stop by on their way to the swamp. Pete’s happy.
The beautiful simplicity of each page and the text’s winsome approach to friendship and difference make this a book children will remember.
BRIDGES ARE TO CROSS
By Philemon Sturges, illustrated by Giles Laroche
Putnam (ages 6-10), $15.99
In pictures that combine drawing, painting and papercutting, Giles Laroche has created a world fascinating in its three-dimensionality, which combines with Philemon Sturges’ text to make bridges become characters, with structures and settings and functions of so many different kinds. Some of the obvious ones are there–the Golden Gate and Sydney Harbor–but there are also such surprises as the Conococheague Aqueduct in Maryland, a waterway bridge big enough for a barge to be carried above and across the river.
This book could be used with and by children of varying ages; a small block of large-type text describes the bridge’s function, and another block of smaller type provides more historical detail. The last page shows a rainbow–a bridge that “just soars”; older readers might wish it had been a page listing further readings about the history of bridges, but imaginations of all ages will travel in this book.
YOU ARE HERE
By Nina Crews
Greenwillow (ages 4-7), $16
Nina Crews’ photo collages create worlds of fantasy. Two little girls, Mariah and Joy, are inside and bored on a rainy day. And, as children since Alice have done, they go on a journey, imagining that they are tiny and traversing the world of their living room. Using a model airplane from their mantelpiece, they fly “far, far away” and meet, among other creatures, a treasure-guarding monster (a.k.a., the family cat).
The book suggests the simple virtues of a change of perspective. While many bored children may not respond to the suggestion that they lie down on the floor and see how the world looks from there, they will delight in looking both before and after the girls’ trip to see the objects within the larger living room. And this reviewer can’t help liking the stop the young explorers make on the bookcase, where fairy tales, Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare call up the tradition of other travelers.
