Untitled Book Review

How few of us in search of books for children know to whom to turn for advice. Miss Anne Carroll Moore, in charge of Children’s Books at the New York Public Library, here gives us an appraisal of the more attractive new titles for young children. Books for boys she will discuss in the December issue.

THE most significant changes in the field of children’s books during the past few years are to be found in the originality and beauty of books designed for children under ten years old and in the fidelity to background and better writing which distinguishes a fair proportion of the books addressed to boys and girls who are entering the teens. But too many of the books addressed to this latter audience look alike and read alike. Fidelity to background and better writing will not make up for the lack of a good story, and good stories are still very scarce.

I note with pleasure that real children and real fairies in new situations look out of some of the books of the year. Very timely is the reissue of Bret Harte’s The Queen of the Pirate Isle (Frederick Warne, $1.50) with Kate Greenaway’s inimitable illustrations. First published in 1887, the book has been so long out of print as to warrant a reminder of the originality and high spirits of this story of American children in the California mining days: Polly, who became Queen; Wan Lee, the Chinese boy whose Oriental intuition sees through all disguises and whose pigtail proves of such practical aid; Hickory Hunt and Patsey and the doll Lady Mary, who loses her scalp on the ’slide.'

‘ It’s lovely,’Ruskin wrote Kate Greenaway. ’The best thing you have ever done — it is so real and natural.

. . . It is all delightful and the text also — and the print.’

Out of a childhood peopled by fairies and little animals, in which the big circus tent appeared and disappeared as if by magic in the meadow adjoining the wood where the fairies lived, Dorothy Lathrop has created The Fairy Circus (Macmillan, $2.50). In this picture storybook Miss Lathrop reveals a too long withheld talent for creative writing as well as for drawing. The delicacy, the swift movement, the elfin zest of these fairies playing at a circus of their own, in which squirrels represent the lions, chipmunks the tigers, and tortoises the elephants, are matched by the wording of the story itself. There is an intellectual and spiritual integrity about it which admits of no cheap artifice or sentimental compromise with the visible or the invisible world of childhood.

For two stories by Walter de la Mare, republished from Broomsticks under the title of The Dutch Cheese (Knopf, $2.00), Dorothy Lathrop has also designed a book of exceptional beauty. To the second of the two stories, of ’The Lovely Myfanwy’ who lived as her father’s prisoner in an old castle on the Welsh Marches, she has given a pictorial interpretation in harmony with the romantic quality of the tale and in sympathy with its special appeal to girls in the teens.

Seven tales of old Italy are included by Mary Gould Davis in The Truce of the Wolf (Harcourt, Brace, $2.00), an exceptionally well printed volume illustrated by Jay Van Everen. These stories were freshly created and retold under Italian skies out of a deep love of the country and a rich and varied experience of life among its people.

The title story is retold from the Fioretti of Saint Francis of Assisi, and the dialogue between Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio is given in a literal translation, conveying thereby an atmosphere of reality often missing from other versions of this story.

But it is in the story of Nanni that the author most fully reveals her creative talent. Out of all the Italian donkeys she has known she has created a good and wise and a very amusing one called Nanni. Nanni not only saves the life of the padre in the story, she becomes also the living symbol of all life on her own native mountain. In conception and in its essential atmosphere this story conveys pictorial impressions of Italy to be found in no other book for boys and girls, the stories were chosen for the older boys and girls rather than for children under ten.

In Boy of the South Seas (Coward-McCann, $2.50) Eunice Tietjens has written a singularly clear and vivid account of the lovely island of Moorea, its people, its customs, and its legends. Ten-year-old Teiki, the son of a chief of the Marquesas Islands, is the hero of the tale, and a dramatic and moving story Mrs. Tietjens has made of his boyhood adventures against a background of authentic treatment of racial longings and aspirations.

Teiki is a living boy growing up in touch with two worlds. That his response to the calls of the spirit world never interferes with the reality of his ordinary existence the creator of this unusual story has made evident by the skillful treatment of what she has observed at first hand. The book is a notable addition to books of travel and to stories of heroic adventure. To many an older reader it will give a fresh realization of youth — whether of individuals or of civilizations.

Truly Oriental in color and delightfully original in conception are the drawings of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire for The Magic Rug (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50). To open this fascinating picture storybook is to go behind the Arabian Nights and create a magic rug for one’s self. Never again will the beautiful pattern and the lovely colors of an Oriental rug seem lifeless to children who have flown with John over the ocean to that ‘small city in Africa where there were large rug markets.’ The illustrations, reproduced directly from the artists’ drawings on stone, include many rare glimpses of Arabian life. The story is largely derived from the pictures and subordinate to them. Children will appreciate its matter-of-fact treatment of extraordinary adventures and the absence of any appeal to the adult reader. The book is one for the whole family rather than for a specified age.

Winning Out (Longmans, Green, $2.00), by Marion Hurd McNeely, has originality of plot ami presentsvividly for the first time in an older girl’s book the nursing profession from first-hand experience in hospital training. In The Jumping-Off Place Mrs. McNeely made a distinctive contribution to present-day writing for girls. Her untimely death before the publication of Winning Out is a serious loss in a field which, along with the art of the novelist, calls for special understanding of the natures of growing girls.

Among biographies, Stonewall (Dutton, $2.50) is the best piece of work I have yet seen. Julia Davis Adams, in writing about Stonewall Jackson, has taken a character she admires and has given him the setting which belongs to him. Without sentimentality, and with a sure sense of the environment and the ways of the man as well as the general, Mrs. Adams has written a biography of real merit.

ANNE CARROLL MOORE