Top 10 for Children

Picture Books

Flotsam, by David Wiesner (Clarion, $17; ages 4-8). A boy finds an old underwater camera on the beach. When he gets the film developed, he is handed not just pictures of submarine mysteries and marvels but the key to a photographic time-travel fantasy.

Lost and Found, by Oliver Jeffers (Philomel, $15.99; ages 4-8). "Once there was a boy who found a penguin at his door." Or at least a swoosh of black, white and orange with two soulful yellow dots for eyes. So he rows the orphan back home -- to the South Pole.

Mommy?, by Maurice Sendak, Arthur Yorinks and Matthew Reinhart (Michael diCapua/Scholastic, $24.95; all ages). In probably the most ambitious pop-up book ever, an angelic tot wanders into a mad scientist's house to star in a kind of ghouls'-night-in version of P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother?.

Probuditi!, by Chris van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95; ages 7-12). Dizzying perspectives, an all-sepia palette and a '40s-era setting heighten the feeling of unfathomable things at work in this tale of sibling one-upmanship and the various arts of manipulation.

The Runaway Dinner, by Allan Ahlberg, illustrated by Bruce Ingman (Candlewick, $15.99; ages 3-8). A sausage named Melvin doesn't want to be eaten, so he sprouts funny little stick legs and runs away, followed by the knife, fork, plate, table, chair, three peas, four carrots and some fries. Epiphanies and calamities ensue.

Silly Suzy Goose, by Petr Horacek (Candlewick, $14.99; ages 3-7). Suzy the gray goose dreams of life beyond the gaggle. Horacek, a Czech artist in tune with the thinking tot, records her rude awakening in brilliant vignettes.

The Squeaky Door, by Margaret Read MacDonald, illustrated by Mary Newell DePalma (HarperCollins, $12.99; ages 3-6). In a seductive retelling of a Puerto Rican folk yarn, Grandma brings a parade of animals to soothe a little boy's jitters over the bedroom door's spooky squeak. But what can soothe their jitters?

Stanley Goes Fishing, by Craig Frazier (Chronicle, $15.95; ages 4-8). Nothing's biting in the sky-mirroring lake, so resourceful Stanley casts his line in the lake-mirror of the sky. A surrealist's dream of summer.

The Three Witches, by Zora Neale Hurston, adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas (HarperCollins, $15.99; ages 6-10). The paintings Faith Ringgold did to accompany this hair-raising tall tale are as lush as the Gulf States where Hurston found it in the 1920s.

Wolves, by Emily Gravett (Simon & Schuster, $15.95; ages 4-8). Trotting along reading a library book titled "Wolves," a rabbit finds its lupine factoids taking on a slavering, sharp-clawed life of their own.