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M IS FOR MOOSE

A Charles Pachter Alphabet

Cormorant Books, 64 pages, $20, all ages

Herein icons abound and are abounding. There's that symbol of all that is northern and wild in Canada (and, let's not forget, Alaska), the moose. There's also the Canadian flag, the maple leaf forever, unfurling, Elizabeth Simcoe, canoes, butter tarts, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Margaret Atwood. Each and all have been the subject matter of Charles Pachter's iconographic, sometimes iconoclastic, paintings - viz. Queen Elizabeth II trooping the colours on a moose.

Pachter puts his well-loved and well-known paintings to use in this splendid rhyming abecedarium, which may itself become something of an icon among its ilk. In this ABC, "B/b is for Butter Tarts, Beaver, B.C., and Barns. Can you think of four items that make better yarns?" "J/j is for Joyride, Oh what a hoot (a joyful Queen astride a moose), and J is for Judges, we supremely salute."

For added value, a recipe for Best Butter Tarts is appended, as well as counting games to play, among which is finding the answer to the question about how many moose are in the book (19). Much fun to be had by all.

TEN LITTLE FINGERS

AND TEN LITTLE TOES

Written by Mem Fox, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, Harcourt, 40 pages, $20.95, ages 1 to 3

"Light as air and sweet as honey" might be a way to describe this delectable confection about babies, here, there and everywhere. This celebration of difference and sameness begins with a double-page spread of a faraway fortress town surrounded by misty mountains - it could be Lhasa, high up on the Tibetan plain. Accompanying this illustration are the words: "There was one little baby who was born far away."

Turn the page, and a swaddled baby in the capacious arms of a delivery nurse/midwife appears, accompanied by the words that complete the rhyme already begun, "And another one who was born the very next day."

These double pages are followed by two others: In one, two babies, one with red spiky hair, the other with black spiky hair, look with interest at each other across the expanse of two pages.

A pair of pudgy hands and a pair of equally pudgy feet appear in successive double pages, and across the bottom of these pages run the lines, "And both of these babies, as everyone knows, had ten little fingers and ten little toes." One little baby might be born in the hills, another might suffer from sneezes and chills, but "both of these babies ... had ten little fingers and ten little toes."

The rhyme repeats itself again and again, serving as the caption on images of babies outside tents, inside cribs, on Arctic ice or in swings. Ending it all is a painting of a large orange-red armchair, back to the reader. In it can be seen a mother's head bending over a baby in her lap. Below this image are the words: "But the next baby born was truly divine, a sweet little child who was mine, all mine. And this little baby, as everyone knows, has ten little fingers, and ten little toes and three little kisses on the tip of its nose."

THE PRINCESS WHO HAD ALMOST EVERYTHING

Written by Mireille Levert, illustrated by Josée Masse, Tundra, 32 pages, $21.99, ages 4 to 7

This princess, Alicia, lived long ago in a castle atop a hill, "as lovely a castle as ever was." Everything about this princess's pinkly perfect life was more or less in that vein. Doting, much-too-patient parents did everything to make her happy, including asking an architect one could assume was the Frank Gehry of that era to design the princess's very own castle; planting a garden with her very own maze; and giving her an electric train just her size.

Most of the time, her verbal reaction to anything she saw or did or had was "BORING." The castle she pronounced as "horrible"; the garden with the maze was "stinky."

On she went, running roughshod over all and sundry, her face with its pointed nose and angry little eyes presenting a stark contrast to all the loveliness around her (including a "dessert wonderland" most small girls would be happy to lose their eye tooth for) until ... she announces to her long-suffering parents that she wants a prince.

Princely supplicants come and go, all ultimately dismissed with a yawn and a grumbled, "I'm bored." But then the last prince arrives on horseback. This one's carrying a large box and wearing what Princess Alicia recognizes as a "warm and friendly smile."

He doesn't appear to be afraid of her and invites her to play with the contents of the box - just paper, many, many sheets of paper. Just as she's preparing to shriek, the prince takes a piece of paper and, folding it many times, produces a paper house. She is intrigued and accepts the suggestion that she make something herself.

From then on, Alicia made things from paper and when she got bored with that, "she learned to paint, then to knit, then to hook rugs, and then to grow wheat. She learned to play the horn. In the years that followed, Princess Alicia and Prince Connor married, and built paper castles to delight their children."

ALPHABET ANIMALS

A Slide-and-Peek

Written and illustrated by Suse MacDonald, Simon & Schuster, 28 pages, $15, ages 3 to 5

In her foreword to this book (it slides out too), MacDonald writes that for many years she did an exercise with students in which they drew animals and birds in the shapes of letters. "It occurred to me recently that this concept would make a great book." Sliders and peekers of Alphabet Animals, young or old, would be hard-pressed not to agree.

Each stationary page features a cleverly contorted creature - reptile, bird or mammal - whose fur, plumage or scales bear little resemblance to reality, but are all the better for that, at least in these circumstances. So, for instance, Bird's body, B-shaped, is deep blue and he/she/it sports a red cockscomb, orange beak, chartreuse wing and tail, and one orange foot. Pull out the slider built into the page and the identifiers are revealed: "B" and "BIRD." An elephant with orange toenails gets itself into the shape of an E, and the Z-shaped Zebra confirms the notion that the medium is the message.

SHIN-CHI'S CANOE

Written by Nicola I. Campbell, illustrated by Kim LaFave, Groundwood, 40 pages, $18.95, ages 4 to 7

Kim LaFave's illustrations for this book are the very model of modern technology employed for illustration purposes: They were drawn in coloured pencil and then scanned, and the resulting digital images were coloured on the computer. Bold and beautiful, they won LaFave a nomination for the Governor-General's Literary Award for Children's Literature - Illustration (won by Montrealer Stéphane Jorisch for The Owl and the Pussycat, with text by Edward Lear). They are an evocative accompaniment to a powerful text.

As the story begins, Shi-shi-etko is waiting in the bright sunlight for the cattle truck that will pick her up and take her back to the Indian residential school. This year, though, she won't be going alone: Her younger brother, six-year-old Shin-chi, will be coming too. Before they leave, the children ask their father to build them a dugout canoe of their own; they are getting too old, they say, to be paddled around by their father. Before the truck leaves, Shi-shi-etko's father tucks a tiny carved canoe into her hand. When they arrive at the school, she gives the tiny canoe to her brother: Its sweet cedar smell will remind him of home.

It is a year before they return home. As Shin-chi tells himself, "Dad said the spring salmon come up the river first, then the sockeye come in the summertime. That's when we can go home again."

Campbell tells the tale of that year, its deprivation, loneliness and sorrow, in grave and tempered language. The children's spirit flickers, but is not extinguished. When they return home the next summer, it is no small joy to find their father building their dugout canoe.

THE SWEETEST ONE OF ALL

Written by Jean Little, illustrated by Marisol Sarrazin, Scholastic, 32 pages, $19.95, ages 4 to 6

Mitigating the sweetness of Marisol Sarrazin's doe-eyed animals is Jean Little's text for this picture book; its clever and tender tartness more than carries the book, and launches it into the small child's must-have stratosphere.

This is a book about many things, about mother animals and their babies; about the correct names for those mothers and their offspring; about mistaken attachments and who really belongs with whom, i.e. calf with cow, piglet with pig; and it's about maternal love.

"The lamb looked up at the sheep. 'Who are you?' she asked. 'I am your mother,' the ewe told her. 'Who am I?' the lamb asked then. 'You,' the sheep said, 'are the loveliest lamb in the land.' "

These opening lines provide an entrée for another pairing. The cow looking at the frolicking lamb wishes out loud that she had a lamb. " 'Nonsense,' said the sheep, with a laugh. 'You don't want a lamb. You want a calf.' "

On the next page, there is a sheep/lamb dialogue in which the calf asks her (newly bonded, we presume) mother, " 'Who am I?' 'You,' said the cow, 'are the cutest calf in the clover.' "

Maternal assurances from various mothers that her particular offspring is "the perkiest piglet in the pen" or "the finest foal in the field" culminate in a human mother pointing to all the animals and their babies and saying to her baby, "But you are my little one, and you are the sweetest one of all."

THE LITTLEST SLED DOG

Written by Michael Kusugak, illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka, Orca Books, 32 pages, $19.95, ages 4 to 7

The small, terrier-like dog with bright, beady eyes at the centre of this delightful picture book - the 10th book on which this duo has collaborated, always to good effect - looks suspiciously like a house pet, if not a lap dog, but she has quite another sense of herself.

Born in Red Deer, Alta., she was fed a steady diet of stories by her mother, stories about other, very large brave dogs. You-too, as she was called, imagined herself as a St. Bernard rescuing stranded skiers in the Alps, or a golden retriever fetching ducks from clear, cold Prairie sloughs. Most of all, though, she wanted to be a sled dog "way up north."

"She would be called Fang or something cool like that. She and the other dogs would weave through snowy trees, with someone yelling, 'Mush, mush' behind them. That was her favourite dream."

You-too does go up North - to Rankin Inlet in Nunavut, to live with a storyteller. There she's called Igvillu, which in Inuktitut means "you too," although she still imagines that she might be a real sled dog called Fang. Only an encounter with the real thing - a fearsome team of sled dogs who "snapped their jaws at each other like alligators" as their food, chunks of frozen fish, was thrown to them, and growled menacingly, teeth bared at little Igvillu in her protective red booties - makes Igvillu reconsider her dreams.

That, and her favourite movie, seen on television from the safety of her master's lap, about a girl walking along a yellow brick road, singing a song with a little dog just like Igvillu at her side. "I'm not going to be a sled dog after all," Igvillu thinks. "I'm going to be a movie star."

THE WAY WE WORK

Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body

Written by David Macaulay with Richard Walker, Houghton Mifflin, 336 pages, $39.95, ages 10 and up

David Macaulay's The Way Things Work is a classic, a visual and textual marvel that investigates - actually shows and tells - the curious way that things work, from "levers to lasers, windmills to websites." His new book is an all-encompassing treatise on that ultimate machine, the human body, the complexities of which are unravelled with considerable panache and no little amount of good humour. An example of the latter is the last page of the book. Past the glossary and the index is the appendix. Macaulay's appendix is a drawing of one, a long, pink, finger-like thing, about which two ladybugs are saying, "That's funny. It doesn't look like a troublemaker."

Macaulay has divided his book into seven chapters, the first of which is titled Building Life, and includes rudimentary but essential things like atoms and molecules and "old family recipes," the name he gives to DNA.

It's smart stuff and visually compelling, with illustrations in coloured pencil that are mostly as large as, if not larger than, life.

The reader becomes Gulliver in the land of very large matter - all manner of matter, from cell to blood vessel, vein to bone to organ, to developing fetus. It is hard not to disagree with the promotion on the book jacket:

"There is no other book like The Way We Work - David Macaulay introduces you to you."