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If birthday wishes and altered landscapes are mute, The Magic World of Words (Macmillan; $6.95), edited by Christopher G. Morris, more than compensates. This Very First Dictionary lucidly explains some 1,500 basic verbs, nouns and adjectives in comprehensible terms that do not send the child in search of yet another word. The illustrations tend to overemphasize exurban aspects of modern life—there is a preponderance of horses to illustrate such items as "chance," "gave" and "thin"—but the drawings are cheerful and the definitions make an important distinction between childish and childlike.
Somewhere in the '50s, William Steig grew in the popular mind from comedian to artist—a leap reflected in his series of now classic children's books. Caleb & Kate (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $7.95) again exhibits Steig's canny palette and a galloping narrative sense worthy of the brothers Grimm. The title characters engage in one of those domestic quarrels that have no origin and a violent end. Caleb slams out of the house, followed by a cascade of insults from his wife. Kate grows to miss her husband, but in time she is consoled by the appearance of a shaggy dog. The story matches the animal—for Caleb has been magically changed into a canine. His trip back to humanity is both a moral and a merriment, revealing the author's mastery of the folk tale and his origins as a magazine cartoonist.
Every child shuttles between the indulgences of fantasy and the demands of reality. Come Away from the Water, Shirley (Crowell; $6.95), by John Burningham, divides the opposing worlds into two parts. On the pages to the left, Shirley's parents prepare for an ordinary day at the beach—complete with folding chairs, snacks and warnings. On the right, Shirley engages in fictive voyages that would do credit to Sinbad, confronts pirates, finds buried treasure and sets sail for shore—all in the glowing terms of a child's interior vision.
Nancy Winslow Parker's Love from Uncle Clyde (Dodd. Mead; $5.25) maintains the same 20/20 insight. The title character is one of the great explorer-eccentrics. There is no finer way to say Merry Christmas, he decides, than to send his nephew a hippopotamus. The great behemoth's adventures on lawns and in bath tubs have the freshness and vigor of a kid with a new crayon, an unlined piece of paper and an unfettered imagination.
The captions of One Old Oxford Ox (Atheneum; $6.95) are little more than exercises in alliterative tongue twisters like "six sportsmen shooting snipe." The illustrations are something else entirely. The purity of Nicola Bayley's hues and her quattrocento landscapes, blended with a parade of lunatic fauna, recall the work of the finest Victorian illustrators—and cry for a text to equal their richness and exuberance.
Graham Oakley manages the illustrator's most difficult balancing act: animals that are true to the story and to themselves. In The Church Mice Adrift (Atheneum; $7.95), without a trace of anthropomorphism, he follows the journey of displaced mice through rain, darkness, rats and cats. His cast is Dickensian, and his male lead, an orange feline named Sampson, turns out to be the most unlikely and delightful Mouseketeer of the year.