A Rainbow of Colorful Reading

By Stefan Kanfer

Children 's literature shows new blends of fantasy, facts and fun

In childhood all books of divination, telling us about the future," observes Graham Greene. "And like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water, they influence the future."

More than children know, their books alter perceptions of the natural and moral worlds.

More than adults acknowledge, those perceptions travel past youth to maturity and age.

That is reason enough to shun most of the ostentatious or shallow works that are beginning to decorate the retail shelves. Still, this and every year, a few volumes speak in the future indicative:

At first glance. The Rainbow Goblins (Thames & Hudson: $24.95), by Ul de Rico, seems to be a cocoa-table book.

Look again. The 13 1/2-in. by 16 1/2-in. size is justified: De Rico's monumental landscapes suggest Leonardo, and his tale is reminiscent of the Grimm brothers. Title roles are played by a group of grouchy little creatures who must be distantly related to black holes: they eat light and color for breakfast. The goblins' quarry is the biggest meal of them all, the rainbow. Their enemies turn out to be every flower and animal on earth. Against those odds, only two species can possibly prevail: the writer and the reader.

A new Dr. Seuss book used to be seasonal, like baseball or oranges. No longer. Theodore Geisel is 74, and his production has slowed. Happily, his screwball has lost none of its velocity. I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!

(Beginner Books; $3.50) again features "the Cat in the Hat," a feline who speaks in the universal language of childhood, whimsy: "You'll learn about Jake the Pillow Snake, and all about Foo-Foo the Snoo." Here, as in more than 30 previous books, the doctor proves to be an eye and ear specialist. His deceptively simple jingle is designed to be heard and inspected repeatedly until the rhythms awaken children to the delights of rhyme and the rewards of literacy.

"Who are you'?" "Me? I'm a lunatic," said the butterfly hunter. "Oh. Then probably you wouldn't know the way to Nocknagel Road." But the lepidopterist does, and eventually the searcher lands where he belongs, in the arms of a beautiful poodle. Which is all right: the hero is fond of putting on the dog. In Tiffky Doofky (Farrar. Straus & Giroux; $7.95), William Steig shows why his juvenile following equals the Pied Piper's, and how four decades as a New Yorker cartoonist have taught him exactly where and how to pull his punch lines.

The skies may be friendly, and the fares lower, but no jet can compete with the fascination of rolling stock on gleaming rails. With this in mind. Donald Crews has used an artist's airbrush and a designer's eye to link up his unique Freight Train (Greenwillow/Morrow; $6.95). The text is as unadorned as a coal car, but the pictures have a purity and force that Amtrak would do well to emulate.

Grasshopper on the Road (Harper & Row; $4.95), by Arnold Lobel, is a picaresque for kids. On his trek, the restless insect meets beetles who carry signs (KISS ME IT'S MORNING), neurotically clean houseflies, worms who bathe in apples, and mosquitoes who follow rules even when they are nonsensical. Like all individualists (and most children), the hero marches to a different summer. Lobel's drawings accompany him with a jaunty cast who have as many legs as a chorus line, and a lot more fun.

Karla Kuskin's A Space Story (Harper & Row; $6.95) mixes the wandering spirit of science fiction with the unalterable facts of astronomy. Gazing at a night full of stars. Sam asks his mother what kind of people could possibly live out there. Galaxies away, another boy gazes out at a different sky and wonders what kind of people could possibly live out there.

Meantime, the planets silently whirl and the stars blaze and die . . . Marc Simont's lithographlike drawings subtly evoke a dreamscape, and Karla Kuskin's poetic narrative has the concentration of an odyssey compressed to the size of a parable.

For American children, the Renaissance is as remote as the Stone Age.

Matteo (Oxford; $8.95) provides a

corrective education disguised as comedy. Fiona French's timing is not exactly Henny Youngman's. and the practical joke that a nobleman plays on a sculptor is somewhat short of hilarious. But her illustrations make shrewd use of the quattrocento palette and the faces on old coins. If Dante had ever written a children's book, these are the paintings he would have wanted in the middle of the journey.

"Once upon a time there was a piece of wood." So begins The Adventures of Pinocchio (Macmillan; $17.50 hardcover, $9.95 paperback), by C. Collodi, translated by Carol della Chiesa. But as this intriguing volume shows, the story has no true ending. The marionette whose nose grows with each lie is almost a century old, and Attilio Mussino's paintings were first printed in 1911. Yet this version --somewhat redesigned for modern consumption--is as ageless as all great fables. The paper clothes, the bread hat, the saintly carpenter Geppetto, the Cat and the Fox, the Azure Fairy are creations of genius, and those who know only the Disney version can now see where the animators got their ideas, and by how much they fell short of the original conception.

Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Dutton; $7.95) is one of the last poems Americans learned by heart. ''The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep" has resonances that go far beyond the ice-glazed trees and horse-drawn carriage of this nostalgic volume. With a minimum of color and some gentle line drawings, Susan Jeffers gives her suite of illustrations a tactile quality: the driver's flannel seems as warm as cloth, and the swirling flakes bring a wintry chill and a welcome Frost to every page.

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.

Once upon a time, E.B. White wrote about Stuart Little, a mouse who lived in a human world. The Rat Race (Doubleday; $5.95), by Colin McNaughton, turns the fable: Anton is a miniboy who spends his time with rodents. The rats turn out to be jocks with tails, more interested in jogging than reading. They also like to cheat at foot races, and the king rat must intervene before Anton wins first prize: freedom to go home to his humongous parents. Readers will be even gladder to see him.

Mushroom in the Rain (Collier; $2.50) is the kind of paperback that gets taken to bed along with security blankets. Mirra Ginsburg's tale is as simple as a rattle, but Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey provide pictures that educate as well as entertain. For the very young, who wonder what happens to animals when it rains or to mushrooms when it doesn't, this slim volume provides reassuring answers.

In Anna's Journey (Collins-World; $7.95), Artist Mitsumasa Anno drops his didactic approach for a textless portrait of trips through rural landscapes. But Anno is too much of a teacher to provide mere illustration. Although Journey is designed in the style of Oriental scroll painting, its locales are European, and close readers can find a series of surprises: details from paintings by Renoir and Millet; children's games; and glimpses of characters from Pinocchio, Little Red Ridinghood and Sesame Street.

By now, both large and small readers should have ODed on war. But William Pene du Bois has a way of suggesting explosions that are as harmless as fireworks. According to The Forbidden Forest (Harper & Row; $7.95), two heroes and a heroine brought the Great War to an end. How they did it provides enough exploits and complications for a Tolstoyan novel. Suffice it to say that the heroine turns out to be a non-human lady who would have been at home in Australia. Those who fear that the subject is too bellicose for young readers should take comfort in the fact that this high-jumping tale is dedicated to Jane Fonda. Besides, as Ogden Nash once shrewdly observed:

Whenever poets want to give you

the idea that something is

particularly meek and mild,

They compare it to a child,

Thereby proving that though poets

with poetry may be rife

They don 't know the facts of life.

-- Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.