Children’s Books

Books Do the Talking in Four Tales for Kids

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Filling the white space: From “Don’t Cross the Line!”

By Rumaan Alam

DON’T CROSS THE LINE!
By Isabel Minhós Martins. Illustrated by Bernardo P. Carvalho. Translated by Daniel Hahn.
40 pp. Gecko Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 7)

THE HAPPIEST BOOK EVER!
Written and illustrated by Bob Shea
40 pp. Disney-Hyperion. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 6 to 8)

ALSO AN OCTOPUS
Or, A Little Bit of Nothing
By Maggie Tokuda-Hall. Illustrated by Benji Davies.
32 pp. Candlewick Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 7)

THE BEAR WHO WASN’T THERE
Written and illustrated by LeUyen Pham
32 pp. Roaring Brook Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 3 to 6)

One of the harder lessons of parenthood is that children often have terrible taste. You play Bjork, but they prefer the soundtrack to “My Little Pony.” You show them “My Neighbor Totoro,” but they’d rather watch “Turbo.” Or maybe it’s just my kids.

We can’t help impressing upon our progeny our own values and politics, but it’s harder by far to inculcate in your kids your sense of aesthetics. We may wish they would ratify our own coolness, but the truth is that no baby alive needs to wear a Sonic Youth onesie. It’s more likely to be Raffi than the Rolling Stones who teaches them to love art.

To create a book that will satisfy both children and adults is a tall order. Still, I’m skeptical of the current vogue in picture books for self-awareness: stories about the act of storytelling, texts conscious of themselves as texts. A dose of irony is right for the times in which we live, but it can feel too much like a bid for the attention of the people who pay for books instead of the kid they’re going to read to.

The Portuguese writer Isabel Minhós Martins’s “Don’t Cross the Line!” is undoubtedly cool. In the story — such as it is — a loudmouthed general orders one of his underlings to keep people from crossing the book’s gutter. The narrative tension relies on understanding that in languages that read left to right it’s the right-hand page that draws our attention.

But it’s not essential to grasp that this is how books function. Bernardo P. Carvalho’s cleverly rendered characters (two boys and a soccer ball, a ghost, an alien, an astronaut) fill the facing page, and are wholly charming. The poor soldier, outnumbered, stands down; the crowd rushes across the page, and his commander is displeased, then deposed. It’s gratifying to see the petty tyrant tossed from his horse, though I suspected the book’s meta-cleverness was meaningless to my 7- and 4-year-old sons. It is enchanting to study the illustrations; it’s less a reading experience than a looking one. To that end, I found myself wishing the soldiers didn’t carry guns. There are some things kids never need to see.

Bob Shea’s “The Happiest Book Ever!” is similarly interested in visual stimulus more than storytelling. Its pages feature a cartoon face, the embodiment of the book itself; the book is its own narrator, and its only aim is to be as happy as the title promises. Thus, it urges the reader to applaud, to give the volume a shake, to tell it jokes. The more the reader does this, the happier the pages become, as measured by the way the blank space fills with various funny illustrations (and one stubbornly unhappy frog that it’s the reader’s mission to cheer up).

But of course, the book doesn’t need the child reader’s participation: It needs the parents’. It’s one of those works a grown-up must understand before diving into; it’s imperative to nail the narrator’s hectoring tone, to make the kid you’re reading to understand that call and response is in order. If you perfect your delivery, it’s a book that will be a big hit.

A self-referential twist is fine but works best when leavened with something — humor, magic, warmth. Jon Stone’s now decades-old “The Monster at the End of This Book,” illustrated by Michael Smollin, is a meta-storybook that is also a very funny story. It’s about “Sesame Street’s” Grover and his fear of the titular monster, who is revealed, of course, to be him. Authored by the show’s first head writer, it’s the rare television tie-in that’s also a great book.

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From “Also an Octopus.”

Stone’s story works because kids understand monsters, and fear, and because Grover’s increasing panic as the pages turn is so silly. Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s “Also an Octopus; Or, A Little Bit of Nothing” is concerned with the nature of storytelling itself — far more abstract than fuzzy monsters. “Every story starts the same way,” Tokuda-Hall tells us, “with nothing.” Fair enough.

The payoff for an adult reading a child’s book is in the child’s reaction. Tokuda-Hall’s tale of an octopus (quite darling, in the illustrator Benji Davies’s rendering) building a spaceship out of waffles made my kids laugh hysterically. There’s no sweeter sound; I wanted to take the shortest route possible to that moment of joy, and would have happily skipped the crash course on narrative that frames it.

LeUyen Pham seems to me a writer and illustrator who is mindful of the younger members of her audience. Her illustrations are cartoonish and cute, even if they didn’t appeal to me the way that Bernardo P. Carvalho’s did. He created a book that wouldn’t be out of place in a museum gift shop, while Pham takes a more traditional approach. But this book isn’t trying to meet my aesthetic requirements; my younger kid was entranced from the get-go.

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From “The Bear Who Wasn’t There.”

The story of “The Bear Who Wasn’t There” is, as you might guess, about the missing bear. There’s an ark’s worth of animals — a wiseacre duck, a misbehaving mouse — and they’re either helpful or not on the quest to locate the bear. The story underscores the artifice of a book, with creatures pulling down the pages, running from one to the next, and even the author herself making an appearance, in cartoon form. It sounds ponderous but is hilarious. There’s some wordplay that made my kids laugh so hard we had to stop for four minutes and savor it.

A book that can appeal to readers big and small in equal measure seems miraculous to me. Crockett Johnson’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon” shows how a meta-text, a book about the power of the page, can manage this. When you’re 3, the thrill is in how Harold can turn a simple circle into a lifesaving hot-air balloon. When you’re 30, introducing Harold to a child you love, the thrill is in seeing how smart a book it actually is. Tricky narrative strategies may feel very of-the-moment, but Johnson’s book is 61 years old. The essential question to ask yourself is simply this: When you bring a book into your home, whom is it for?

Rumaan Alam is the author of the novel “Rich and Pretty.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 30 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Pages’ Turn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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