Gregor and the Marks of Secret
By Suzanne Collins
Scholastic, $16.99
Ages 10-14 years
Readers could begin with this fourth book in the Underland Chronicles because Suzanne Collins introduces summarizing details early. Underneath the New York we know lies Underland, and yes, there are roaches and rats, but with histories and languages of their own. Some human beings fall through into this land and may or may not survive there. Gregor appears to be a long-prophesied warrior of the kingdom. He’s also only 12, so there’s a dose of adolescence thrown in with the adventure. Gregor and Queen Luxa try to determine why mice are vanishing. The giant white rat, Bane, last seen as an infant, has matured into a frightening demagogue.
Gorilla! Gorilla!
By Jeanne Willis, illustrated by Tony Ross
Atheneum, $15.95
Ages 4-6 years
Despite the title, the story begins with a distraught mother mouse with a lost baby. As the mother mouse queries the locals, “Out jumped a great, big, hairy, scary ape!” And here’s where the fable begins, really, as the mouse runs over continent after continent to escape the “killer” gorilla. She goes “[a]ll the way to the Arctic” before learning the truth about the rescuer of her baby.
Beach
By Elisha Cooper
Orchard, $16.99
Ages 5-8 years
Imagine you could go to the beach for days with an artist whose notebook recorded all that happens there. Think about the different styles people have when entering the water, or using their towels, or putting on sunscreen. How many sounds could you hear, from “sloshing and gurgling” to the “whine of Jet Skis” or the “muffled clanging” of a buoy? The sky is grand and the clouds are splendid. Elisha Cooper manages an uncanny combination of filling his pages yet leaving us so much comfortable space to view all the items on them. Read before you go to the beach, and see and hear more when you arrive.
Seven for a Secret
By Laurence Anholt, illustrated by Jim Coplestone
Frances Lincoln, $15.95
Ages 7-9 years
The rhyme about magpies (“1 for sorrow, 2 for joy . . . “) is more known in Britain, where this book started out, than here, but the complete verses, up to “7 for a secret never to be told,” are included early on. The story is told in letters between a grandfather who lives in a small forest cottage and his urban granddaughter. Changes are coming in both their lives–a new baby in the city, where money is scarce; less good health in the country, where the grandfather is making something mysterious. Everyone’s life changes, but it’s dealt with in graceful and oblique ways, giving a comforting sense that memories outlast change.
Sleepy Places
By Judy Hindley, illustrated by Tor Freeman
Candlewick, $15.99
Ages 4-6 years
“Do you suppose you could drowse in a rose, or snooze in the ooze like a frog?” The verse here is perky and brisk, but the pictures are best of all, as when we imagine the three children pictured trying to sleep upside down like bats. Tor Freeman’s animals all look remarkably at home in their sleeping nests, as the children, finally, do also.
Masterpieces Up Close: Western Painting From the 14th to 20th Centuries
By Claire d’Harcourt
Chronicle, $22.99
Ages 10-14 years
This book is not designed as a run-up-your-SAT-score primer. Claire d’Harcourt makes intriguing fun out of art history’s material. There are 10 or so questions, on 21 images, asking readers to notice and read the small details. The answers, and some are quite tentative and preliminary, don’t come until later, so there’s no open and shut feeling of art-history-as-flash-cards. It’s art history as mystery, as a glimpse of the many ways artists might work.
