What, No Trains ?
The Lear Omnibus. Edited by R. L. Megroz. (Hutchinson. 6s.) A Christmas Carol. By Charles Dickens. Pan Books Ltd. (Collins. 4s. 6d.) The Magic Bedknob. By Mary Norton. (Dent. 6s.)
The Enchanted Village. By Guy Rawlence. (Coffins. 8s. 6d.)
Flaxen Braids. By Annette Tu mg ren.—Ferry the Fearless. By Carola Oman. (Puffin Story Books. 9d. each.)
A Penny for the Guy. By Clare Collas. (Peter Davis. 8s. 6d.) The Dark World of Animals. By Eleanor Farieon and T. Stoney. (Sylvan Press. 15s.)
7s. 6d.)
Two reprints deserve to head this necessarily breathless list. Although Mr. Megroz rather annoyingly intrudes himself here and there in facetious footnotes, The Lear Omnibus is a rich selection from the Nonsense Rhymes, Alphabet, Limericks, stories and odd- ments like the recipe " to make an Amblongus Pie." Messrs. Collins' reprint of A Christmas Carol, with colour lithographs after the drawings by John Leech that were hand-tinted in the first edition, is as charming a present as could be given, or received ; and the giver may linger a moment or two to admire Dickens's masterly mixture of the everyday and the supernatural. To compound that mixture right is the main problem for one class of children's authors. For instance, a treatise could be written on the different treatment of the supernatural in The Magic Bedknob and in The Enchanted Village, and on the reasons why (for one reader at least) the super- natural comes off triumphantly in the first, and rather lamely in the second. Both stories launch normal children from normal homes into magic adventures. Both have village ladies turning into witches. Mr. Rawlence offers the thicker plot, involving buried treasure as well as broomsticks, but his figures—Mr. Pilgrim the Rector, old Screwbody the Miller, and Sir Roderick Frumping the Squire— are stylised and caricatured, whereas Miss Norton, mainly interested in how it suddenly feels to be mixed up in magic, creates real and likeable characters in Miss Price, who works so hard for her results (" Have you ever heard of a rich witch? "), and the children, whose use of her magic lands them into serious and convincing difficulties with grown-ups. In Little Reuben and the Mermaids (which in- corporates the original Little Reuben stories) the real flows easily and comically into the magic, and the stories respond well to the test of reading aloud.
Of the straight stories, the two new Puffin books head the list. both in content and appearance. Flaxen Braids, about a child in Sweden, will please readers whose parents were brought up on Miss Martineau's Feats on the Fjord ; those who are lucky enough to snap up and enjoy a copy of Ferry the Fearless, Carola Oman's excellent story of the boys and girls of a Crusader, might give a grateful thought in passing to Miss Yonge, whose Little Duke was one of the first books to see the past through a child's eyes. Trouble at Townsend is competently built on the contrast between two London children, with their self-assertion and cinema experience of life, and the hard facts of living in the country. This reader's response to A Penny for the Guy was slightly complicated by the words " A Real Story," under the title. If Real means true, this tale of a little cockney girl, whose genius (backed by a generous patroness) carried her swiftly to prizes, fame, the Academy, a holiday in South Africa, dinner at Government House, and the love of a charming and wealthy young man, is indeed most striking, and one would like to see her pictures ; if it is not founded on fact, then at once it seems too uniformly rosy to convince. In any case, it is competently told, and the illustrations by Dod Proctor are effective.
Into no special category of age or genre comes The Dark World of Animals ; its plan and its price put it in reach only of exceptional children. Engravings in white, on a black ground, of goats, pigs, deer, cows, tortoises, a lion and a donkey, accompanying without directly illustrating some discursive memories by Eleanor Farjeon, in which Alice Meynell appears among the pigs and Edward Thomas is re- called' by the deer of Epping Forest. Even apart from its price, the new Puffin Wonders of Animal Life would be thought better value by most children ; but admittedly its covers would come off far sooner.
Little Turk or Japanese 0! don't you wish that you were me?
cried Stevenson in the old bad days ; now, nice children arc en- couraged from an early age to understand what it feels to be foreign. Pearl Buck introduces them pleasantly to little Chinese in The Water-Buffalo Children ; in Little Allies Countess Hermynia zur Muhlen has collected fairy and folk-tales from fourteen nations ; there is a collection of Folk Tales of the Peoples of the Soviet Union. But one other major interest of children seems to have been neglected this Christmas. At the end of Merula Salaman's attractive miscel- lany, Christopher's Rainy Day Book, the children say—" And now will you buy us some sweets? And some buns? And a Train book? " Here are a baker's dozen of children's books, and not a Train among the lot!
JANET ADAM SMITH-
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