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IT'S USEFUL TO HAVE A DUCK Written and illustrated by Isol, Groundwood, unpaginated, $10, ages 2 to 5 This accordion-style book comes in its own slipcase – a feature that will intrigue young readers – and it's a two-sided bit of drollery in more ways than one. The “duck” side is a duck-egg-yolk yellow, and it suggests in very few words and a few deft black ink squiggles why, from a small boy's perspective, it's useful to have a duck.

Said duck can be ridden like a rocking horse, or used as a hat, or, with its beak in the boy's mouth, it can become a whistle or a straw. When all's said and done, the boy abandons ship, so to speak: “Then I leave him in the tub and when the water is gone, I use him for a plug.”

Flip the book and it becomes – all in blue – the duck's take on why it's useful to have a boy. The squiggle drawings are exactly the same but represent quite a different take on “usefulness.” Instead of the duck serving as a rocking horse for the boy, the boy is now rubbing the duck's back. Now the duck uses his elevated position on the boy's head to see the view; on the other side of things, you'll remember, the boy used the duck as a hat.

As things wind down on this side of the book, the duck is not the bathtub plug; rather he uses the bathtub hole as “my little sleeping hole.” Perception is all, here, and the upper-age-range readers of this book will especially appreciate this aspect of the book.

BRADLEY McGOGG, THE VERY FINE FROG By Tim Beiser, illustrated by Rachel Berman, Tundra, 24 pages, $19.99, ages 2 to 5

A very fine frog indeed, is Bradley McGogg. Dressed in a pink striped Churchillian boiler suit with a pink-and-white polka-dot tie – a colour combination that nicely sets off the reptilian green of his complexion – Brad extols the virtues of the bog in which he makes his home: “‘Oh, beautiful bog,' croaked McGogg./ ‘What an Eden!/ You're filled to the gills with/ good frog things to feed on!'” One day, though, viewing himself in the mirror, McGogg declares that he's “needing a feeding. I'm wasting away!” With that, he's off, carried on waves of rhyme to visit Miss Mouse in her nest, Herr Bear and Herr Hare in their shared lair, and a lovely black and white cow in her field.

None of their offerings – cheese (“Cheddar with chives and a/ peppercorn dusting!/ He'd never seen anything/ quite so disgusting”), carrots glazed with honey or the cow's staples of grass and clover – tickle Brad's taste buds.

He returns home to a bog filled with “good frog things to feed on”: “stinkbugs and sweet buzzy bees,/ flies, squirmy worms, crunchy roaches and fleas.” Our frog McGogg declares, “Holy smokes! Other folks/ eat some pretty strange things.”

This delightful excursion is made even more so because Rachel Berman's illustrations, interpretations of the miniature worlds of mouse nests and bear and hare picnics, are nothing short of entrancing.

BIG AND SMALL, ROOM FOR ALL By Jo Ellen Bogart, illustrated by Gillian Newland, Tundra, 32 pages, $20.99, ages 2 to 4

A small girl sitting in the branches of a large tree that overlooks a vast landscape of field and mountain is the subject matter of the opening double-page spread of this book, which delves into smallness and bigness and the way that small inhabits big and big encircles small.

And yes, there is room for all. Room for a small sun in a big sky and a big sun juxtaposed with a small Earth. Room, too, for a big Earth and a small mountain, a big mountain and a small tree, a big tree and a small man, and so on down the chain of smallness to the question: “Big flea, big flea/ What is smaller than a flea?” The answer is that there is another world of things much too small to see. And then another question: “Big sky, big sky,/ What is bigger/ than the sky?” The answer to this is, “The never-ever-ending sky.”

Wonderful watercolours by Gillian Newland offer images of sun, sky, trees and animals which have moments of Blakeian transcendence about them.

TULIP AND LUPIN FOREVER Written and illustrated by Mireille Levert, translated by Elisa Amado, Groundwood, 40 pages, $18.95, ages 4 to 7

“Here is Tulip, the watering fairy. She is holding Lupin, a dog bee and honeymaker, whom she loves.”

If those opening lines don't get the audience's attention, then author-illustrator Mireille Levert's watercolour of cherry-red tulips on a field of white certainly will. An eyeful of colour and flower good enough to eat, this two-page spread upon closer examination reveals the watering fairy, Tulip, wearing a watering can as a hat, among the stamens of one of the tulips, bearing Lupin in her arms.

Tulip's and Lupin's days together are idyllic. They drink a cup of dog honey together as they watch the sunrise, and Tulip pours “pearly drops of water down onto the flowers for them to drink. Lupin sucks a little nectar from each one and stores it in his sack. It takes lots of nectar to make honey.” At night, they howl at the moon.

But after thousands and thousands of days together, “Tulip notices that Lupin is slowing down. Sometimes he even forgets what game they are playing. And finally, one morning, tulip can't wake up her beloved Lupin at all. As everyone knows, dog bees don't live as long as watering fairies.”

Grief, plain and powerful, is what befalls Tulip, and moving though it to the other side – with adventures and experiences along the way – is this book's gentle, subtle tale.

THE QUEEN OF PARADISE'S GARDEN Adapted by Andy Jones, illustrated by Darka Erdelji, Running the Goat Books and Broadsides, 44 pages, $18.95, ages 6 and up

Even the endpapers of this book – faded flowery wallpaper studded with ancient family photographs – are a delight to the eye. Surreal watercolours of this and that – birds in a tree, strange human figures – dot the book, fine illustrations for a delectable retelling of a fine old Newfoundland tale.

The reteller is writer and actor Andy Jones, a founding member of Newfoundland's CODCO troupe. With this provenance, you might expect something original and quite fine; you won't be disappointed.

In the fine old folk tale/fairy tale tradition, this story involves three brothers who, alarmed by their parents' rapid aging, leave home in search of a magic fruit that will reverse the decline. They're told by “Old Blind Pew” that such a thing exists, but “it only exists in the Queen of Paradise's garden, and that is three miles this side of the end of the world.”

It probably won't come as any surprise to hear that Jack, the least likely brother, the kind brother, conquers all. What he conquers is told in a most satisfactory and satisfying way, in the sprightliest, most musical prose, Newfoundlandese in which nary a “g” can be found danglin' from the end of a word.

WHITEFOOT A Story from the Center of the World By Wendell Berry, illustrated by Davis Te Selle, Counterpoint, 60 pages, $28.50, ages 6 and up

This small jewel of a book, with its exquisite pencil drawings, begins thusly: “Her name was Peromyscus leucopus, but she did not know it. I think it had been a long time since the mice around Port William spoke English, let alone Latin. Her language was the dialect of mouse, a tongue for which we humans have never developed a vocabulary or grammar. Because I don't know her name in Mouse, I will call her Whitefoot.”

In simple but elegant prose, Wendell Berry carries his readers into his Story from the Centre of the World and into the very heart of Whitefoot's circumscribed, one-acre world as she eats, sleeps, nests and endures days of torrential rain that wash her out of her world and into a river in flood.

A fine tension is held: Will she survive, her temporary home a knothole in a floating log carried along by the flood waters?

ANIMAL AHA! Thrilling Discoveries in Wildlife Science By Diane Swanson, Annick, 48 pages, $9.95, ages 7 to 9

In this book about animal behaviour, it quickly becomes apparent that research and observation and their concomitant discoveries reward the patient. Take, for instance, the discovery that gorillas use tools, one of the six “wonders of wildlife” discussed here.

Although other great apes – chimpanzees, orangutans and humans – use tools to greater and lesser degrees, gorillas had never been observed doing so. After 10 years of close observation of gorillas in a dense Congo rain forest, Thomas Breuer and his team were astonished to see a gorilla snap off a branch of a tree and use it, not just to help wade up a river, but also to gauge the depth of the stream as she moved forward. Subsequent sightings indicated that gorillas used sticks to make bridges over a stream and as a brace for one hand as they gathered water plants in a river with the other.

Other Aha! moments in a book liberally laced with photographs of, and “fast fact” boxes about, the various creatures described include the discovery that the heart of the Burmese python actually grows 40 per cent bigger than its usual size after each meal; it's a growth that fuels the effort of eating, say, a pig, in one fell swoop.

The chapter Parrots That Speak With Meaning looks at the acquisition of language by the now-famous Alex, the African grey parrot that is the subject of Irene Pepperberg's recent book, Alex and Me .