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Bit by Bit, by Shoichi Nejime, illustrated by Heather Castles, Annick, 32 pages, $8.95, ages 2 to 5
Mr. Caterpillar was taking a walk one day, "bit by bit, bit by bit," along a leaf, enjoying its movement beneath him, feeling it "swing and sway." Suddenly a gust of wind blew him off the leaf, and "over and sideways, over and sideways" he turned, thinking it was all over for him until he landed with a thud on the brim of a gentleman's hat.

"Swiftly and surely, swiftly and surely" — for that is the pace of the man in whose hat he is riding — Mr. Caterpillar moves through the world, until the gentleman doffs his hat to Mrs. Quick, and Mr. Caterpillar lands on Mrs. Quick's shoulder.

In this way, Mr. Caterpillar is propelled through the world, sometimes "rushing and hurrying," sometimes "bit by bit," sometimes "stretching and shrinking," ultimately ending up in the cuff of a man's pants. He is transported back to where he came from and, through a series of incidents, back to a leaf on a tree where he dreams of becoming a butterfly.

Repetition and movement are the order of the day in this hypnotic charmer of a book, in which the lilting prose is well matched by watercolours that seem to roll off the pages with their own bright rhythm.

Shi-shi-etko, by Nicola I. Campbell, illustrated by Kim LaFave, Groundwood, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 4 to 7
The colour palette of this picture book is autumnal: the russet and yellow of leaves about to fall, clear blue skies and the steely grey of water kicked up by a cool wind. Thus Kim LaFave's illustrations send out their own poignant signals in consort with the elliptical and deceptively simple prose poem they illustrate. In this story about a four-year-old native girl, Shi-shi-etko, author Nicola Campbell — who is of Interior Salish and Métis ancestry — brings home the impact of the residential schools tragedy in the life of one small girl.

Shi-shi-etko is taking her leave of her family and her community as she prepares to go to residential school. On each of the four mornings left to her before she leaves her village, Shi-shi-etko "looked at everything —/ tall grass swaying to the rhythm of the breeze,/ determined mosquitoes,/ working bumblebees./ She memorized each shiny rock,/ the sand beneath her feet,/ crayfish and minnows and tadpoles/ that squirmed between her toes,/ all at the bottom of the creek."

Cousins, aunties and uncles and her old granny, Yahah, come for a last dinner of sockeye salmon; father takes her out on a last paddle in the canoe; she collects memories in a bag made of deer hide and sinew, filling it with sprigs of pine, hemlock and cedar, "dried berry, root, flower and fragrant leaf." She buries her bag beneath a great fir tree, asking Grandfather Tree to keep her memories and her family safe until she returns.

As the cattle truck carries her away to school, Shi-shi-etko remembers all that she holds dear in her heart.

Mixed Beasts, by Wallace Edwards, verses by Kenyon Cox, Kids Can, 32 pages, $19.95, ages 5 and up
Mixed Beasts is a worthy successor to Wallace Edwards's earlier books, Monkey Business and Alphabeasts, and yet another showcase for a significant artistic talent deployed for surreal ends.

Here he's having fun combining tops and bottoms, or heads and tails, of unlikely partners to produce a Rhinocerostrich, a Creampuffin or a Kangarooster, to name just a few of his mixed beasts. Each quite astonishing beast is the main attraction in a richly colourful, full-page painting, but of equal appeal is the extraneous matter surrounding it, which might include fowl balls, fly balls, tiger lilies, catbirds and horse flies, all there for eager eyes to espy.

Edwards's muse is Kenyon Cox (1856-1919), whose verses have inspired creations like the Camelephant, a curious, even glorious hybrid with two humps and an elephant head, accompanied by this ditty: "This is the ship of the jungle,/ Whose form is much of a bungle./ He never is happy except when in bed,/ for it takes all his strength to hold up his head."

Surrounding the beast couchant on a daybed, its head propped up on pillows, are all manner of flora and fauna and not a few smaller mixed beasts and other oddities including a bullfrog (frog with hooves) and a cockatwo (a double-headed you-know-what).

An appendix, "Being an alphabetic listing of other wondrous beasts," identifies and illustrates a few of the creatures encountered in the background of each of the mainstage paintings, from Army Ant to Dandylion, from Springer Spaniel to Trumpeter Swan.

Earth to Audrey, by Susan Hughes, illustrated by Stéphane Poulin, Kids Can, 32 pages, $18.95, ages 5 to 8
Stéphane Poulin has a unique style. His flat-faced humans with their deeply shadowed eyes almost always look as if they are from another planet. How apt, then, how felicitous, that he has undertaken the illustration of this thought-provoking, haunting picture book.

Ray, the narrator, a boy whose friends have gone away to summer camp, has decided that the strange girl spending the summer with her father in the house next door must be an alien. Of course, because she's Audrey as created by Poulin, she looks like one — her carrot-coloured braids rise from her head like antennae. But she also behaves like one, training grasshoppers, sending signals to someone somewhere, lying down looking up at something — Ray's never quite sure what. Since he's bored and he's always wanted to meet an alien, he decides to say hello.

Audrey, at first reluctant to talk and apparently not comfortable speaking Earth English, gradually opens up. Audrey's perceptions of the world around her reveal a new world for Ray, and ironically it's Audrey, clearly not quite of this world, who expands Ray's universe so that "I felt like we were in her spaceship, seeing the Earth for the first time, new and astonishing."

Audrey introduces Ray to Earth hugs, and to more than a few questions metaphysical and otherwise about the way the planet works. In turn, Ray introduces Audrey to the park and riding bikes around a track and swimming in the public pool: "After watching her in the water, I could tell there weren't swimming pools on her planet."

Then August ends and Audrey's mother arrives to take her home. Thinking about the summer with Audrey, Ray "remembered before meeting Audrey and then after meeting Audrey. Nothing and then something." Of course he wants her to stay, "to give up her life in space. Earth was a good place to live. I could see she was getting to like it."

The last words of this remarkable book are Audrey's response to Ray's request that she stay: "I can't stay, but I'll come back next summer. ..... I wouldn't miss it for anything in the whole universe."

The Red Sash, by Jean E. Pendziwol, illustrated by Nicolas Debon, Groundwood, 32 pages, $16.95, ages 5 to 8
Endpapers provide the geographical context for this picture book: It's a native encampment adjacent to Fort William, on the shores of Gitchee Gumee, now known as Lake Superior. The body of this picture book-cum-historical fiction concerns a young native boy living in the encampment in the time of the North West Company, circa 1803-1821.

As this book begins, it is the time of the "rendezvous," "when winter traders paddle to Fort William with their packs of furs to meet the North West Company canoes coming from Montreal bringing supplies."

The boy, the "I" in this story, hopes that his father will be among the voyageurs returning in a heavily laden canoe.

But in the meantime, a new day unfolds. The boy and his mother paddle across from their encampment to Fort William, where his mother works in the fort's kitchen.

Debon's wonderfully bold gouache and mixed-media paintings — some of which are double-page expanses of the bluest of blue lake interspersed with green islands, on which the text appears to float — captivate with their detail of fort life, their freshness perfectly attuned to this tale's tone.

Adventures are had: a canoe trip to a nearby island; a storm that quickly blows up, threatening a canoe carrying a "gentleman" from the North West Company, allowing our hero to be the hero. At the end of the day, there is feasting and dancing in Fort William, and the boy's father — who has returned — gives his son the voyageur's traditional red sash, a token of his love and admiration for his son.

Terry Fox: A Story of Hope, by Maxine Trottier, Scholastic, 32 pages, $16.99, ages 7 and up
THe photographs liberally sprinkled through this book, published to mark the 25th anniversary of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope, show us a seemingly ordinary Canadian boy: at nine months of age in his pram; posed at 4 with his older brother Fred in front of the Christmas tree; growing up in several smiling formal family portraits; playing baseball with his mother; on basketball teams in his teens.

Terry Fox, from Port Coquitlam, B.C., was no ordinary boy, though, no ordinary young man and no ordinary Canadian. Even when he was a small boy, his determination (or "Fox stubbornness") was evident. Although he played soccer, baseball and rugby, competed in track and field and was a cross-country runner, he only wanted to play the game he couldn't play: basketball. He trained and practised relentlessly so that by Grade 10 he had earned a berth on the school basketball team and went on to play for Simon Fraser University.

This tenacity, Maxine Trottier suggests, might in part account for Terry Fox's ability to overcome the loss of his leg from bone cancer, and to run at the rate of 26 miles a day for 143 days from Newfoundland to Thunder Bay in his Marathon of Hope.

But as well as tenacity, there was also — as Trottier makes abundantly clear in this well-balanced, inspiring picture book — a superhuman kind of courage, the capacity to dream and an ability to hope and bring hope into the lives of all Canadians.

Coming to Canada, by Susan Hughes, Maple Tree, 104 pages, $19.95, ages 9 to 14
Another in the lively, information-packed WOW Canada! series, this capacious book begins by addressing the question about who the first immigrants to Canada were. In doing so, author Susan Hughes presents two theories, the first of which is that between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago, Stone Age hunters may have crossed over to what is now Canada via a "land" bridge over the Bering Strait from Siberia to what is now Alaska.

A second theory is that the first immigrants to the Western hemisphere came by boat from Asia, Australia or Siberia, because the current running between Japan and the west coast of North America would have made that possible.

While the answer to the means by which Canada's first immigrants arrived in this country may be moot, there is no question that "those first arrivals were the ancestors of Canada's Native peoples. ..... Others came after them, by foot or by boat. And as time passed, they came by horse and train. They arrived on sailing ships, on steamships and on ocean liners. More recently, they have travelled by airplane, reducing the once exhausting trip from months, weeks and days to a matter of hours."

Aided by archival photographs of people, places and things — or artifacts — Hughes charts the cavalcade of immigrants to Canada, from Samuel de Champlain's colony at Quebec to the many Somalis who have recently found a haven from civil war and starvation in Canada.

Canada's failure to provide a safe home or welcome is also declared: The Chinese Exclusion Act, the Komagata Maru incident (in 1914, a Japanese ship bearing hundreds of would-be immigrants from India was turned back at Vancouver), and the internment of Japanese Canadians following Pearl Harbor are telling examples.

Two parallel timelines, one of world events and the other of Canadian immigration events, provide useful reference points for students of history.

The Kids Book of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, by Diane Silvey, illustrated by John Mantha, Kids Can, 64 pages, $19.95, ages 8 to 12
Diane Silvey, a member of the Sechelt Band of the Coast Salish, has provided a comprehensive and invaluable account of Canada's aboriginal peoples' lives before and after they came into contact with Europeans.

As she explains in her introduction, there were seven major groups of aboriginal people, each with distinct cultures: "Where they lived played an important role in how they lived."

The first seven chapters of this book describe in extensive detail the cultures — including housing, artifacts, languages and methods of fishing and hunting — of those seven major groups: the peoples of the Northwest Coast, of the Plateau, of the Plains, of the Arctic, of the Subarctic, Iroquoians of the Eastern Woodlands and Algonquians of the Eastern Woodlands.

Silvey's text is lively and easily navigated and is complemented by excellent and judiciously placed maps and illustrations of aboriginal life in all its variety and manifestations. The names of peoples and places are those they use, not the names given to them by Europeans.

The eighth and last chapter, Aboriginal Peoples after Contact, focuses on European exploration, the conquest and sale of aboriginal lands, the devastation of aboriginal peoples by the diseases brought by explorers and settlers, the Riel Rebellion, and the residential-schools issue. Re8lieving the darkness of this history, though, are profiles of contemporary aboriginal people who have, in various ways, advanced the cause of self-government, and the renewal and rebuilding of aboriginal culture.

Research Ate My Brain: The Panic-Proof Guide to Surviving Homework, by the Toronto Public Library, illustrations by Martha Newbigging, Annick, 96 pages, $9.95, ages 10 and up
In her foreword for this book, Josephine Bryant, city librarian of the Toronto Public Library, acknowledges that while the tone of this book, as well as its layout and situational graphic art, were designed to appeal to the tweens/teens for whom it was written, the book will be useful for older students and adults.

Indeed it will. Adults, perhaps seniors, just now confronting the daunting possibilities of the www. in their lives will particularly welcome this book — although perhaps not for the same reasons that younger people might.

Research Ate My Brain makes a great case for that ever-evolving institution, the public library, as the go-to place for homework help, particularly as a source of information for pro8jects and papers. The Toronto Public Library, for example, provides free access to more than 140 research data bases, in addition to expert advice, books, magazines, newspaper archives, videos and specialized collections.

Not only will this book provide a route map to the search engines and databases available in libraries — including that heretofore black hole, the deep web — it will also, among other things, outline how to undertake a research-based project — beginning with a dummy-proof work plan — show how to cite sources, explain what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, tell how to avoid on-line predators and provide a multitude of websites that will be of interest to researchers, or just information gatherers, of all ages and stages.

Our Stories, Our Songs: African Children Talk About AIDS, by Deborah Ellis, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 104 pages, $17.95, ages 12 and up
Deborah Ellis prefaces the chapters in this book with quotes from various sources, among them Christina Rossetti, Magic Johnson, Nelson Mandela and Canada's Stephen Lewis.

Lewis, the UN Secretary-General's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, writes that he doesn't believe that "the world yet fully appreciates the accelerating and monumental nature of the catastrophe, that what's happening in Africa now may be a harbinger of what is going to happen in South Asia."

"If," he continues, "China and India are hit in a similar way, and end up with millions of people between fifteen and forty-nine getting infected with and then dying of AIDS, then we're talking about not just tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of people. How the devil do you deal with it? You've got to put a human face on it!"

Putting a human face on the scourge of HIV/AIDS in Malawi and Zambia is precisely what Ellis has done here, using a combination of personal stories and "boxes" that deliver the hard truths of the disease in the form of facts and statistics. The first statistic Ellis offers is that AIDS has orphaned 11.5 million children in sub-Saharan Africa; by the year 2020, that number is expected to rise to 20 million.

The personal stories — children orphaned by AIDS, grandmothers bringing up their dead children's children, those who are HIV-positive and from those who don't want to know whether they are, almost all of whom are living in extreme poverty — are remarkable for the sense of grace and hopefulness they impart.

Carmen, by Carole Fréchette, translated by Susan Ouriou, Red Deer, 108 pages, $16.95 ages 12 and up
"The fact that her name is Carmen seems like a mistake to her. She thinks her name should be Anne or Alice, a name that slides easily off the tongue and discreetly dies out on a last and oh-so-silent e." So begins Quebec playwright Carole Fréchette's quirky, disarming novel, originally published as Carmen en fugue mineure.

Carmen's father chose her name, "because of the opera." And as far as he's concerned, his daughter possesses all his operatic heroine's best attributes; she's "destined for great things."

But although she has Carmen's black hair and black eyes, this Carmen feels nothing like that one. She wants to tell her father that although she may look a little like the operatic Carmen, "inside I'm ..... I'm fair and pale and scared." But she doesn't. The almost 15-year-old Carmen lives a quiet, ordered existence. An only child, she's a good student who has never done anything that might remotely be considered out of the ordinary or out of bounds. She has not, for instance, ever skipped school or shoplifted or smoked in the park with the cool girls in her class.

Nevertheless, one February day, Valentine's Day to be precise, Carmen goes AWOL. Instead of going to school and delivering her speech on antique statues, and facing the humiliation she knows will be the outcome of a letter slipped into the locker of a boy to whom she's attracted, she keeps walking.

And therein lies the tale of a girl who, over the next 24 hours, is interviewed on the street by TV news about what Valentine's Day means to her, who shoplifts lipsticks, who follows a young rock star she recognizes in the laundromat, and who travels a long way off her normal course, albeit for the shortest of times, to find herself and like herself for who she is.

It's a journey that Fréchette charts with an all-seeing eye, a pitch-perfect ear and a voice that will resonate with readers.