The first picture books of 2001 provide, in their exuberance and variety, an exciting foretaste of what may be to come later in the year. Young readers lucky enough to encounter even some of these will have the chance to enjoy imaginative storylines and sophisticated art: as they construct their own interpretations of this rich mixture, they embark on their reading careers.
Easily the most unusual of the new arrivals is Lawrence David's Beetle Boy (Bloomsbury, £9.99 hbk in UK), inspired, as the title page reminds us, by Kafka's Metamorphosis. Here, the Gregor Samsa of the original becomes schoolboy Gregory Sampson, awaking one morning to discover his transformation to giant beetle and to cope with the responses which his new state is going to provoke at home and at school.
David's humorous handling of the fable is such that the narrative creates the opportunity for Gregory's status, both in his own eyes and in his family's, to be reassessed, resulting in new shared understandings of difference and acceptance.
Delphine Durand's full colour illustrations, characterised by unusual angular perspectives and busy detail, wonderfully suggest a household and environment where the everyday and the extraordinary could easily co-exist.
LANDSCAPE figures prominently also in Katherine Lodge's Eugene the Plane- Spotter (Bloomsbury, £9.99 hbk in UK), in which a young boy's fascination with flying is rewarded when he wins a round-the-world aeroplane ticket and sets off on a magical tour.
With Paris, Pisa and the Pyramids (and much else) on the itinerary, there are numerous opportunities, well taken, for local colour and idiosyncratic detail; but the book is saved from being merely a geographical guide by the permanently enthusiastic and wide-eyed character of Eugene himself, always open to new experience and quirkily responding to it.
David McKee's Elmer and Grandpa Eldo (Andersen, £9.99 hbk in UK) we are in the more familiar territory of the much loved patchwork elephant, on this occasion visiting his grandfather and keen to remind him that he, Elmer, has the much sharper memory of the fun and games they once shared.
But the McKee mischief shows itself in the manner in which young Elmer's certainties are gradually eroded as he comes to appreciate that, truly, old elephants do not forget. This delightful juxtaposition of aged wisdom and youthful innocence is played out against a vividly coloured background of tropical forest.
NOTIONS of quirkiness abound in the work of Tony Ross and fans of his "Little Princess" series will welcome the latest addition, I Want My Dummy (Andersen, £9.99 hbk in UK), where the forcibly independent young royal is as
mischievously insensitive as ever to adult conventions of decorum and propriety. Ross conveys quite brilliantly, in both the directness of his text and the harum-scarum wildness of his pictures, the raucous egoism of early childhood, but always (as the final page here shows) in a context where it can be safely contained.
WHILE the title of Dayle Ann Dodds' The Great Divide (Walker, £4.99 pbk in UK) might prepare us for all sorts of sociological or theological speculation, the clue as to its real focus lies in its subtitle, "A Mathematical Marathon". In this helter-skelter rhyming story an initial field of eighty racing competitors, on just about every form of land, sea and air transport, is eventually whittled down to the winner - in, incidentally, an ending of which young flyer Eugene would have approved. There is a tremendous sense of madcap pace and energy in Dodds' lines, excellently sustained in Tracy Mitchell's bold colour splashes.
THE starting point for Peggy Rathmann's 10 Minutes Till Bedtime (Puffin, £4.99 pbk in UK) is also mathematical and the pace is equally hectic. With only ten minutes left before sleep, a young child finds a busload of hamsters arriving for a bedroom tour, in the process creating havoc (welcomed by the child, less so by the impatient parent!) with bedtime plans.
Out of this zany idea Rathmann develops what is in effect a wordless story, but one where the almost endless and very witty detail of the bustling pictures will keep young listeners enthralled for well beyond the proposed time scale of the title.
BEDTIME themes come to the fore once again in Christine Davenier's Sleepy Sophie (Walker, £4.99 pbk in UK), where, rather unusually, the young heroine is a woodchuck. Desperately anxious to find a quiet place to sleep, she is frustrated in her attempts to do so by the noise of other creatures around her - until, in turn, she herself proves to be a disturbance to someone else looking for a night's rest.
The nocturnal setting of the story is exquisitely captured in the generous sweeps of cream and brown in Davenier's watercolours: plenty to look at here and much potential also, in the animal noises, for child participation.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education in Dublin.