WONDROUS RIDES
FROM THE WARM, EVERY-NIGHT reality of bed, the wild adventuring can go anywhere: to the fun of a long, jingly poem about a snooty cat, to the soaring fantasy of a ride through the night sky on carousel horses come alive, to the lovingly mapped realism of a Midwestern farm through a season of hay growing. A sampling of this season's best journeys for young readers and listeners:
1. CAT, YOU BETTER COME HOME, by Garrison Keillor, with paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Viking; $15.99), presents the sage of Lake Wobegon in bardic mode, with a talking blues for cat owners. Puff disdains the low-rent cat food her master serves and hightails it for the big city. Her master pleads, "Come home, old Puff, come home to us,/ There's a lot of new benefits I'd like to discuss." No dice. "I saw her six months later in a cat magazine./ She was the Number One TV cat-food queen/...I could tell it was Puff even though she was wrapped/ In a white mink stole and her teeth were capped." Kids love the jingle-jangle verse, and cats listen thoughtfully.
2. MATH CURSE, by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (Viking; $16.99), is a great book for kids still too young to know they hate math. Even the dedication is fiendish: "If the sum of my nieces and nephews equals 15, and their product equals 54, and I have more nephews than nieces, how many nephews and how many nieces is this book dedicated to?" O.K., 9 and 6. But when the teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, counts "1,1,2,3,5,8,13..." what are the next five numbers in her puzzle?
3. HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION, by Mark Teague (Crown; $16), is an amiable spoof of a traditional fourth-grade hoodoo. Remember having to stand up in front of the class telling the stupid stuff you did while school was out? Wallace Bleff is a kid who gets even by inventing a big story--in verse, no less--about being captured by cowboys: "The Cattle Boss growled as he told me to sit/ 'We need a new cowboy. Our old cowboy quit./ We could sure use your help. So what do you say?'/ I thought for a minute, then I told him, 'Okay.'" Great illustrations--funny, but not cutesy--by the author, who has drawn his buckaroos without a six-gun in sight.
4. HAYSTACK, by Bonnie and Arthur Geisert (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), is a prize: a fascinating, beautifully drawn progression of Midwestern farmscapes showing the yearly building and slow consumption of an enormous, barn-sized haystack. Hay in a big field is cut with a tractor and sickle bar, then raked into windrows and stacked with a hydraulic lift and pitchforks. The great hay pile then serves as both food and shelter, first for cattle, then for pigs, through the long winter. There's no preaching, but important lessons are learned about work and weather, and how life might seem in the vast, busy emptiness of a prairie farm.
5. SHORTCUT, by David Macaulay (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), is a funny, silly and exceedingly complicated adventure (Agatha Christie would have rejected the plot as too intricate) that is just right for an alert six-year-old and a wide-awake parent. The gifted artist, whose books Castle and Cathedral brought medieval architecture to life, starts with a farmer and his horse taking a load of melons to market and winds up dealing with a runaway train, a lost pig, an escaped hot-air balloon and more. All logical, too, if your eyes are sharp.
6. WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY TO BE A COW, by Carolyn Lesser, illustrated by Melissa Bay Mathis (Knopf; $15), is a calendar of gentle, friendly pastel illustrations of farm animals--kittens, piglets, barn swallows, mice--simple enough for a first book and with enough detail to be interesting for the first couple of years of being read to.
7. THE HOUSE GOBBALEEN, by Lloyd Alexander, illustrated by Diane Goode (Dutton; $15.99), has the look and sly feel of an Irish folk story. Tooley is a silly fellow who complains about his luck; Gladsake is a worldly-wise cat who tells him his luck is no worse than anyone else's ("It's the nature of a pig to break out of a sty, as it's the nature of a sty to be broken out of"). A greedy, fat elf called Hooks shows up and freeloads, fed by Tooley in the hope that he will bring luck. What Hooks is on the point of bringing is bankruptcy, until Gladsake conspires to roll him out the door. Fine, rascally illustrations make the tale easy to believe.
8. THE CAROUSEL, by Liz Rosenberg and Jim LaMarche (Harcourt Brace; $16), is a beautiful, dreamlike imagining: two sisters walking home from school one winter afternoon wander through their town park, hear whinnying noises from the long-broken carousel and discover that the wooden horses are alive. They ride up above the treetops, and the wild swirl and soar of LaMarche's paintings show what that riding must have been like. A haunting theme is that the girls' mother is no longer part of their household. Dead? Divorced? We're not told, but the sisters use a toolbox the mother has left behind to fix the mechanism of the broken carousel she once loved. It's a good, intuitive resolution of loss, and a point at which a grandparent reading aloud might, for instance, help an uneasy child through his fears.
9. JEREMY KOOLOO, by Tim Mahurin (Dutton; $13.99), is a funny, good-natured alphabet book for three-year-olds, whose mischievous hero is A Big Cat, Jeremy Kooloo himself. This greedy fuzzball, we're shown in a series of cheerfully cat-aclysmic illustrations, Drank Every Full Glass of milk, Hiccuped and so on, causing havoc through the full array of letters, until, sure enough, ZZZZ, or cat-alepsy.
10. SWAMI ON RYE, by Maira Kalman (Viking; "all is an illusion but you must still pay $16 for this book"), sends Max the pun-crazy dog off on the subway to get herring (don't ask) for his puppily pregnant wife when, suddenly, he's on a magic carpet over India, seeing the impossible possibled, spying "a woman carrying four baskets of fish on her head and four fish carrying a basket of women on their heads," and learning the meaning of life from a guru who googools, "As the bulbul bird barks you shall see." Inspired, irreverent nonsense for nine-year-olds whose thoughts bounce easily "from fish to knish to gibberish."