Stories Told to Children

THE cool autumn evenings are ail ideal time for reading aloud. For parents, and particularly those who are surprised to find how flat some childhood ‘classics’ fall upon the youngsters of to-day. there may be assistance in this selection of ’juveniles’ prepared for us by Miss Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Public Library.

THERE is a fresh invitation to take a holiday with children at home or abroad in the books published during the spring and summer. Alice and Thomas and Jane (Knopf, $2.50), written and illustrated by Enid Bagnold, assisted in the drawings by her young daughter Laurian, is the most irresistible of new travel books for children. Though most of the scene is laid in England, the book contains more flavor of France in a single chapter than is to be found in any child’s book I can recall. This story, invented by Lady Jones for the entertainment of her own children while on a summer holiday at the village of Rottingdean by the sea, — ‘a place where all houses are made of cobbles,’— is refreshingly different and exceptionally well written.

Alice, who is five, Jane, seven, and Thomas, eight, talk and plot their adventures as all children talk and plot among themselves. The ideas behind the adventures are children’s ideas, and they are carried out in the story as only a close observer of children s ways of thinking and acting, with a novelist’s skill in characterization, could carry them out.

Small wonder that the author’s children ‘hardly breathed’ while listening to Thomas’s adventure which bore him away from the distressing spectacle of whooping cough at home to France, and a memorable experience of eating snails with French sailors at Dieppe.

The clarity and charm of the drawings which illustrate the story will fix in the mind of many an American child the coast line of England and that of France in an unforgettable way, while the very smells of Dieppe are stored in Thomas’s exploration of the old town before and after dark.

In The Terrible Nuisance and Other Stories (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50), Peggy Bacon has also written and illustrated stories first told to her own children. Juliana, Timothy, and Benjy of these stories live in an American country village, and the inside of the village store and schoolhouse is pictured in characteristic drawings, The five stories are not connected except by association with the same characters, ‘The Reward of Virtue’ and ‘The County Fair’ are exceptionally well done. Pictorially the book is uncommonly true to the background depicted and is less exaggerated in conception than some of the earlier work of this interesting artist-author. Peggy Bacon’s drawings of children ate done with a lively sense of their individuality. One feels that her writing for children is sometimes less effective. What the children do and say in her stories is not so clearly remembered as how they look.

But there is no doubt that the two children and the goat named Anna Marie are very much alive in Emma Brock’s new picture storybook, the Greedy Goat (Knopf, $1.75)! The story is told in a manner to delight young children, while the illustrations in violet, black, and green give characteristic impressions of the little village in the Austrian Tyrol where Miss Brock made her sketches. It is as freshly conceived and as well printed a picture book as To Market, to Market, which had Holland for a background.

Roundabout Europe (Harpers, $2.50), written and illustrated by Anne Merriman Peek, a companion book to her Storybook Europe published two years ago, will interest older boys and girls. Spain and Germany are the countries which receive most attention in this volume. Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland are scantily treated under the heading, ‘Three Little Countries,’and there is a section devoted to the Mediterranean and the Gateway to Spain. Miss Peek’s text is unpretentious and readable and is accompanied by a suggestive bibliography for more extended reading. Her many drawings contribute to an attractive book.

For those who love horses, Buckaroo, by Fjeril Hess (Macmillan, $2,50), is surely to be recommended. It is the true story of a college girl’s experience in teaching school in the ranch country of Nevada. The author records her own adventure with a sincerity and virility which make it absorbing. The story is perhaps not as well integrated as one could wish, but it rings true of Nevada, and it will especially interest horse-loving girls. Lee Townsend has made spirited drawings of horses for the end papers and the body of the book.

Digging in Yucatan, by Ann Axtell Morris (Doubleday, $3.50), is an uncommonly vivid first-hand account of the explorations of Chichen Itza and the reërection of the Maya Temple of the Warriors by the archæological expedition of which her husband was in charge. It reads in part like a story, and girls and boys of high-school age will appreciate the extent to which it will inform other reading and open up new territory. The many excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated and the drawings by Jean Charlot, who worked with Mrs. Morris on the Temple murals, are in full accord with the text.

A notable biography for girls is an event of importance. Irene Cooper Willis has written such a book; Florence Nightingale (Coward-MeCann, $2.00) is a biography of exceptional quality. The picture it presents of the life of women in general and of English history of the period is in full accord with the desire of girls and boys to be treated fairly in these matters.

ANNE CARROLL MOORE