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Beatrix Potter lives! Her influence is so profound that the ghosts of Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin are palpable in The Hedgehog Feast (Windmill Dutton; $5.95). Artist Edith Holden, who wrote The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, was in fact a contemporary of Miss Potter's, and though her book is made for U.S. consumption, it speaks with a strong English accent. The Feast's delicate watercolors and brittie story may seem a bit too quiet in the epoch of Sesame Street, but they have a settling effect that parents and children are owed at the end of a hard day at play group.
Some jokes never go out of style. Russell Hoban's The Twenty-Elephant Restaurant (Atheneum; $8.95) tells the story of an entrepreneur who advertises for big gray animals to help in his work. When twenty of them answer a want ad, the man and his wife set up an eatery. But some problems surface: "Why is my cream-of-chicken soup sliding back and forth in the bowl?" customers ask. Another diner inquires, "Why is my Jello quivering like that?" Those responsible lumber out of town, but the place goes with them. Only now it has become a one-man circus and a twenty-elephant restaurant. Russell Hoban knows how to keep a civil tongue in his cheek, and Emily Arnold McCully's watercolors are a happy recollection of Babar, Dumbo and the city zoo.
James Stevenson is another New Yorker cartoonist who has turned his attention to children, perhaps because he has nine of his own. With fine comic effect in Winston, Newton, Elton, and Ed (Green-willow/Morrow; $5.95), he introduces some walruses who engage in sibling revelry, and a penguin who gets in and out of hot water on the polar icecap. Stevenson's animals always imply that they are being impersonated by children in fur costumes, a dramatic contrast to the standard parents' theory that their offspring are really animals in human guise.
There can be few finer forecasts than Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Atheneum; $8.95). And few more hilarious hardcovers. In the town of Chewand-swallow, the weather acts as a bill of fare. When it rains hamburgers, that is the plat du jour. When hot dogs blow in, mustard clouds cannot be far behind. Unfortunately, a season of salt-and-pepper storms overwhelms the place, and the citizens set out for a new land. Neither children nor adults are quite the same afterward. But, as Judi Barrett's words and Ron Barrett's droll drawings indicate, eating goes on as soon as the townspeople learn to separate the menu from the boys.
Bored—Nothing to Do! (Doubleday; $6.95) is more than a familiar cry. It is also a sly send-up of grownups who boast, "When I was your, age . . ." Two brothers, deep in the throes of ennui, are told to make something of their time. What they make is a rickety airplane, a perfect vehicle for Peter Spier's story and spidery illustrations. All children, and honest adults, will recognize the moral: the youths get grounded after near catastrophe, whereupon the parents loudly boast about their sons' ingenuity.