Secrets, Toys, Mice and a Beetle

THE BLACK BOOK OF SECRETSBy F.E. Higgins Feiwel and Friends. $14.95 (ages 9-12)

This enticingly titled first novel is hardly flawless: Its point of view is wobbly, it flirts with melodrama, and it bristles with stage villains. But pre-teens who enjoy historically based fantasy -- the story is purportedly set centuries back but reeks of Dickensian England -- will find The Black Book of Secrets thoroughly rewarding. It starts with a bang: "When I opened my eyes I knew that nothing in my miserable life prior to that moment could possibly be as bad as what was about to happen." Let's just say that the torture awaiting the young narrator, Ludlow Fitch, is dental in nature, and not easily forgotten. But Ludlow escapes, stows away on a carriage out of the ghastly City and ends up in a remote mountain village. There he becomes the assistant to a pawnbroker, new in town, who pays the villagers not just for their miserable goods but for their innermost secrets, which Ludlow inscribes nightly in a big black book. Who is this calm, Latin-spouting amateur shrink? What does he want with all those confessions? And what will the despotic local landlord make of Joe Zabbidou's growing hold over the villagers? Here's a hint: "Joe was the breath of fresh air the village had needed . . . . The place seemed brighter, somehow, as if the buildings themselves had released a huge sigh and relaxed back to allow the light in."

THE CURIOUS ADVENTURES OF THE ABANDONED TOYSBy Julian Fellowes Illustrated by S.D. Schindler Henry Holt. $17.95 (ages 7-10)

Fellowes wrote the script for that wonderful, autumnal, English-country-house whodunit "Gosford Park," so it's no surprise that one of the two things distinguishing this gentle tale is its mellifluous language; the other is Schindler's illustrations. Unlike the movie, though, the book is graced by a simple plot: A tattered teddy bear named Doc, who has lived for years in a children's hospital, is thrown out in a "spruce-up" and finds himself at the dump, where he befriends several other lost or abandoned toys and even gets a chance to use his medical skills. Sentimentality is kept at bay by just the right amounts of suspense, sadness and old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip decorum. "It was a dark evening, and there was a slight drizzle that soon soaked his fur, but as he lay on top of the rubbish Doc could not resist a sense of elation. He felt, as he wriggled beneath some surgical wadding and a copy of the Guardian. . . that, all things considered, he had withstood his testing with an admirable lack of panic."

MRS. MARLOWE'S MICEBy Frank Asch and Devin Asch Kids Can Press. $17.95 (ages 4-8)

Two years ago, this father-and-son team collaborated on the brilliant Mr. Maxwell's Mouse, in which the upper bourgeoisie in the shape of a very fat cat was given its comeuppance by a mouse. Mice are good guys here, too, but the real hero is a dissident cat, the elegant librarian Mrs. Marlowe, who in defiance of the Department of Catland Security harbors a colony of the perky rodents in her apartment. Evoking a '30s-era city with decidedly Teutonic overtones (accordion-playing cats, cats in Nazi-style uniforms), the brooding pictures convey the terrors of a police state even as the text remains reassuringly jaunty. (" 'Me! A mouse-keeper?' Mrs. Marlowe chuckled. 'Why, that's ridiculous!' ")

THE VOYAGE OF THE BEETLEBy Anne H. Weaver Illustrated by George Lawrence Univ. of New Mexico. $16.95 (ages 9-12)

In this copiously illustrated introduction to evolution, written by an anthropologist, a rose chafer beetle from a Cambridge garden tags along with Charles Darwin when he signs on in 1831 as the HMS Beagle's naturalist -- or make that "adventurer in the world of ideas." The Beagle's five-year, round-the-world voyage would inspire Darwin's theory of natural selection, but to hear Rosie the beetle tell it, she figured it all out first, planting clues in his notes that kids can follow for themselves to their logical conclusion.

Elizabeth Ward can be reached at warde@washpost.com.