National Children's Book Week

• What should they read?

Gillian Freeman

The Thumble Boy Josef Guggenmos translated by Olive Jones (Methuen £1.95).

How the Sun was Brought Back to the Sky Mirra Ginsburg (Hamish Hamilton £2.30) The Hijacked Hovercraft Jacynth Hope-Simpson (Heinemann 50p) Sleep is for Everyone Paul Showers (Black 95p) Clouds Karl-Heinz Appelmann (Methuen 95p) A Paper of Pins Margaret Gordon (Macmillan £1.75) The Quest for the Missing Queen Paul Hulshof and Robert Vincent Schipper, translated by Lance Salway (Kestrel Books, £1.95) . Patatrac Jean Jacques Loup (Jonathan Cape £1.50) Mark's Wheelchair Adventures Camilla Jessel (Methuen £1.95) Do we expose them or protect them? Is it better to prepare the young for life's realities or cocoon them, while we are able, in the security of the nursery world.

"Oh, look!" said a small boy of my acquaintance as the news came on again for the second time -_ the visual news, that is "There's that monk burning himself again."

The problem of equating true-life with entertainment is not one to be lightly discounted. "Switch off the news, dear. If I see another body on a Belfast pavement I'll die of boredom!" Repetition diminishes. The small screen particularly has a way of reducing, horrors and thrills to minimum impact. Even the man on the moon seemed pretty mundane when he had taken the gigantic step for mankind for the fifth time in two hours.

What about books? In the contemporary social set-up it is, even at any early age, difficult to keep the kiddies away from the 'box.' The news follows the children' programmes; if they can't discuss Kojak they're liable to lose their friends; limited to Blue Peter, they will nip round to the neighbours to watch Sale of the Century and develop the acquisitive lust you are struggling to prevent. But books are a. different matter altogether. Repeated reading maybe, but there is parental choice. Books can which Kojak regrettably cannot mysteriously disappear. What do we want our children to read, since the choice is wideand the function of the exercise multifold. Primarily there is the matter of learning to read or is it primarily one of the books on my desk at this moment has no words at all, but it is a smashing book for all that; funny, imaginative, a bit bizarre mind-stretching in its own way. (It is called Patatrac and without a single syllable will absorb the looker for hours.): Perhaps the primary aim should be to make books enjoyable, lead the prospective bibliophile to the crossroads which will take him to Nabokov, Jane Austen, Barbara Cartland or who you will. Faced with the bookshop display or the library shelves how should we select? Should we go for the appealing fantasy as remote from daily life as Purley from Peru, or should we remain within the bounds of familiar environment, reflecting the immediate world.

The ThumbIe Boy and The Quest for the Missing Queen are both fantasies. Thu mble Boy is a male Thumbelina, with some scarey moments (is he going to be devoured by the baby birds?) beautifully illustrated, read in a flash and happily concluded. The Quest for the Missing Queen is much more elaborate, the drawings are in black and white (a sensible, price-cutting procedure which I hope other publishers will follow in these austere days) and it has a curiously compelling quality.

A Paper of Pins is a song-book-with-a-story and is wildly pretty. Little girls, rather than little boys I think will appreciate it for the summery illustrations and the romantic twist no, I'm not being sexist, 'bf course there are some boys who will love it! And I don't think I am being cynical when I class it with the fantasies either.

Mirra Ginsburg and illustrators Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey hover between the imaginative and the real with a colourful piece of sun-worship. How the Sun was Brought back to the Sky. I would recommend it for everything but its price, unless you have a built-in aversion to animal talk. Clouds, which start their chicks sun-search, are, predictably, the substance of the sensibly priced and thoroughly realistic book Clouds by Karl-Heinz Appelman.

The afternoon is hot and sultry.

Children are playing in parks and gardens.

The sun is beating down. But look what happens when clouds come

That is one third of the text. The rest comes at the end after we have seen the light change, the storm come and go and the rainbow appear in the brightening sky. It is an imaginative illumination of the child's experience.

Sleep is for Everyone goes a step further. The text and the drawings demonstrate the findings of a team of scientists researching the need for sleep, why some people need it more than others, how the mind wanders in the state between waking and sleeping, and how our emotions are dictated by whether or not we are tired. The illustrations are a little disappointing, although their subject matter is exactly right. There is a different kind of reality going on in The Hijacked Hovercraft the Kojak kind. The guns turn out to be water-pistols, but there are some tense moments first, a very televisual book which begins with Perfection Pet Foods and ends with your actual Blue Peter cameras recording the heroes' return. This is a good read for those who can read to themselves, but not for anyone of a nervous disposition setting off to take the Hovercraft to the continent The most important book in this collection is, without doubt, Mark's Wheelchair Adventures, which breaks new ground. It is illustrated by photographs, but is more than a documentary, and while encouraging the handicapped to accept their disabilities it also teaches the physically fit that there are similar human beings behind the defects. It is not only an artful lesson in humanitarian behaviour, but a lively exposition of the progress of Mark (who has spina bifida) and spastic Tessa, their friends on the housing estate and their shared and extremely normal interests and activities. Tessa's poem is touching testimony to the mind inside the inadequately functioning machine; Mark's tough personality emerges from the marvellous pictures and the no-nonsence text. We all have to come to terms with ourselves in one way or another, and these two children more than most.

This is the kind of reality to which I would subject every young reader; life with hope, in fact, and no amount of rereading would dull the sense of positive achievement the author imparts. That is her achievement.

Gillian Freeman has most recently written a novel, The Marriage Machine. Her biography of Angela Brazil is to be published later in the year by Hamish Hamilton.