Of Cats, Myths and Pizza

By Stefan Kanfer

Susan Sontag once defined books as "funny little portable pieces of thought." It is an apt description of this year's outstanding works for children. All twelve selected are thoughtful, small and funny in both senses of the word: odd and risible.

One winter morning, Will's mother and father inform him that his favorite fauna, the woolly mammoth, is extinct. But the boy knows better. Squinting his eyes, he manages to conjure up the prehistoric past, complete with saber- toothed tigers, early versions of horses, warthogs and, of course, the elephant's tusky ancestor. In Will's Mammoth (Putnam; $14.95), Stephen Gammell augments Rafe Martin's whimsical text with celebrations of early mammals, snow and that greatest of all time machines, a child's imagination.

Behemoths are not an exclusive of the dinosaur era. Some of them can still be spotted spouting in the oceans of the world. Seymour Simon's nonfiction * Whales (Crowell; $14.95) follows their astonishing life cycle as the babies drink 100 gal. of milk a day, breathe through a hole in the top of their heads, learn to dive a mile deep, and eventually become so immense that their tongues can weigh as much as a full-grown elephant. The leviathans seem fantastic, but 20 detailed photographs of the endangered species show that big is beautiful -- and actual.

Scaly, furry and feathered creatures speak for themselves in Turtle in July (Macmillan; $13.95). Marilyn Singer's liberated verses suggest bodily rhythms (Deer Mouse: "get enough to last/ get enough to store/ get more"; Beavers: "You guard/ I pack/ I dig/ You stack"; Dragonfly: "Look/ skim/ there/ snap/ eat/ Repeat"). Meanwhile, Jerry Pinkney's watercolors furnish the shades and tints of four seasons and 15 highly articulate animals.

By contrast, The Heartaches of a French Cat (Godine; $14.95) features a mute cast of felines. Author and illustrator Barbara McClintock places her 19th century tale onstage, where everything is expressed through the dramatic pose and the pregnant paws. Minette is pursued by the rakish Count Bisquet and the worthy Lionel. In the end she spurns them both to write her scandalous memoir, which becomes an overnight success. If there is any justice, so will this comic biography.

Nancy Ekholm Burkert's luminous accompaniments to the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear are classics of the genre. The French legend of Valentine & Orson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16.95) further enhances her reputation. Twins are separated at birth; one is raised by a king in a court, the other by a bear in a forest. The boys meet as antagonists, but after a series of picaresque adventures, become reunited and rewarded. This too is staged as a drama, enacted by rhyming players who evoke the best of Ingmar Bergman, Walt Disney and the artist-adapter herself.

An older story enlivens Theseus and the Minotaur (McElderry Books; $13.95). In Crete, seven men and seven maidens were regularly sacrificed to a monster who was half man, half bull. Young Theseus refused to go along with tradition and tracked the dreaded Minotaur to the center of his labyrinth, with results that have been chronicled for two millenniums. In this latest retelling, Warwick Hutton finds a dual use for his pen: to provide a lucid translation, and to produce a series of colorful and poignant sketches. They underline Joseph Campbell's characterization of the Greek myth as a fusion of "innocence and majesty."

Not all myths are ancient. Only a few decades ago, Mrs. Pelligrino left Italy to visit friends in New York City. There she plunged into depression. No one had heard of her favorite food, a dish made of dough, tomatoes, cheese, garlic and pepper. In an attempt to please her, some sympathetic children gathered the ingredients, lighted the oven . . . and that was How Pizza Came to Queens (Potter; $13.95). Dayal Kaur Khalsa serves a slice of history with exactly the right blend of drawings, text, spice and whimsy.

Food is also the centerpiece of Olson's Meat Pies (R&S; $12.95). A bookkeeper absconds with a baker's savings. In order to stay in business, the impoverished Olson compromises his product. First he includes an assortment of leftovers, then pieces of laundry and, finally, a series of outlandish premiums. Disaster beckons until the bookkeeper contritely reappears, loot in hand. Good taste returns, and so do the customers. But everyone remains nostalgic for the exotic days when watches and earrings and little windup monkeys appeared in the pies. This is the child's version of a screwball comedy, with script by Peter Cohen and special effects by Olof Landstrom.

Because of a typographical error, says Jack Prelutsky, the Poems of A. Nonny Mouse (Knopf; $12.95) have been mistakenly attributed to "Anonymous." To correct this misfortune, he anthologizes some 70 of her immortal rhymes, including "Algy met a bear,/ A bear met Algy,/ The bear was bulgy,/ The bulge was Algy"; "Way down South,/ Where bananas grow,/ A grasshopper stepped on an elephant's toe./ The elephant said with tears in his eyes,/ 'Pick on somebody your own size' "; and "The firefly is a funny bug,/ He hasn't any mind./ He blunders all the way through life/ With his headlight on behind." Henrik Drescher's loony drawings validate Prelutsky's conclusion: Ms. "Mouse was . . . more clever than one might expect from a creature with no chin, sparse fur, and a long thin tail."

"Ladybugs strut and toads sashay,/ moths and mantises wing their way,/ snap-turtles swing and grasshoppers sway." The Bug-a-Wug Cricket Band is in town, and the six-legged sidemen are setting the summer night afire, particularly banjoist Nicholas Cricket (Harper & Row; $12.89). Joyce Maxner's lilting text is full of mood music, and William Joyce amplifies it with paintings that seem to vibrate with the irresistible beat of bluegrass.

; The unanswerable questions of children are treated with dignity and humor in Does God Have a Big Toe? (Harper & Row; $14.95). Marc Gellman, a rabbi, patiently retells Bible stories from a youthful view: Noah said to his friend, "You know, Jabal, this might be a very good time for you to take those swimming lessons you have been talking about for so long." Adam and his wife, Moses and his tablets, Joseph and his coat -- all are here with their moral testaments, made even easier to apprehend with Oscar de Mejo's eloquent landscapes of Eden and afterward.

In this abbreviated version, A Christmas Carol (Viking Penguin; $14.95) is presented as "A Changing Picture and Lift-the-Flap Book." Thanks to Kareen Taylerson's ingenious designs, young readers can move a lever and create a banquet, make Jacob Marley materialize out of the air and, finally, reprieve Ebenezer Scrooge. But Charles Dickens' famous ending is unillustrated -- and rightly so. Its wish is worth a thousand pictures: "It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well. May that be said of all of us!"