Picture Books

Mysterious visitors and simple pleasures enliven these books for kids.

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Opposites Attract

Authors of illustrated books for very young readers confront a challenge that is more daunting than it may appear. To succeed, they must keep it simple -- communicate instructive ideas in very basic language and pictures -- without exhausting young readers' notoriously brief attention spans. Laura Vaccaro Seeger achieves that trick and then some in Black? White! Day? Night! (Roaring Brook, $16.95; ages 3-7), a smartly conceived, cleverly designed exploration of opposites and their meanings.

Readers encounter each pair of opposites by lifting a flap. For example, "Black" is written in white letters on a black page at the bottom of which is a white square cutout featuring a black bat winging against a white sky. Lifting the flap transforms the bat into the smiling mouth of a friendly white ghost outlined in black. Throughout, Seeger portrays various contrasting pairs -- under/over, tiny/huge -- in brilliant reds, yellows and oranges that give a Pop Art feel to the pages. Despite the minimal text, Black? White! Day? Night! rewards multiple readings, an important quality in books designed to teach youngsters instead of merely entertain them.

Down is Up

Tom MacRae's The Opposite (Peachtree, $15.95; ages 4-8) is an equally fanciful approach to the same concept. It begins in mesmerizing fashion, with a pajama-clad boy sitting up in his bed and staring quizzically at an odd, comical figure dangling above his head. The description of that scene, typical of those in the rest of the book, is of the slyly witty variety that often provokes a double take:

"When Nate woke up one morning, The Opposite was standing on the ceiling, staring down at him.

" 'You can't stand on the ceiling,' said Nate. 'Get down!'

"But then The Opposite happened, and it stayed where it was."

The Opposite is a quirky little lurker who pops up here and there like those guys from the Blue Man Group, except he isn't blue. Fond of making mischief, he causes messes for which Nate gets blamed, leaving a trail of spilled milk and paint across the book's sprightly pages. The Opposite is clever, but young Nate is cleverer, and he soon arrives at a method for getting the better of his antagonist.

MacRae, a television writer making his picture-book debut, has created a wonderfully offbeat tale.

Backyard Escapade

The offbeat takes center stage in Donald Barthelme's The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn (Overlook, $19.95; ages 4-8). It is the absurdist story of a young girl named Mathilda who had a brief Alice in Wonderland-type adventure in "a recent year, a year not too long ago -- the year 1887, to be precise." Like Nate in The Opposite, Mathilda experiences odd things as soon as she wakes. In her case, it all begins when she wanders into the backyard And discovers that "a mysterious Chinese house, only six feet high, had grown there overnight."

Mathilda is a self-possessed and self-aware girl. "Very few people are as brave as me," she declares -- before heading in. This might be a good place to mention that Mathilda dearly wants a fire engine, a sparkling red one. She suspects it may be just the kind of thing one finds inside a mysterious and noisy Chinese house.

It contains many treasures but no such truck, alas. However, that doesn't stop Mathilda from constantly bringing up the subject to the occupants inside, which include a rainmaker, an acrobatic elephant, a pirate and a djinn who serves as the building's official tour guide.