In our desire to educate children, we...

In our desire to educate children, we often forget that play is the most important way in which they learn to master the world around them. The best children’s authors almost always appeal to this youthful playfulness. The ability to think as freely and fancifully as a child is often what distinguishes a writer’s books from the many earnest and well-meaning volumes that end up gathering dust on the shelves.

Mitsumasa Anno, the Japanese author and illustrator, and the winner of the Hans Christian Anderson Award, the highest honor in the field of children’s literature, is a man who consistently writes and draws with this childlike freshness. Two new books display his wit and creativity.

Topsy-Turvies is a book of optical illusions, a series of colored drawings (without text) that children will love puzzling and marveling over. The pictures show elfin men performing impossible feats: walking on walls and ceilings, casting shadows in the air, bathing in a book. Like all optical illusions, the pictures shift before your eyes--the inside becomes outside, the top becomes bottom. “Impossible?” asks Anno in a postscript. “No, that’s a word used only by ‘grown-ups.’ ” In the child’s and Anno’s world of make-believe, nothing is impossible.

In Anno’s Aesop, the author tries another approach “to stretch the imagination” by adding a second interpretation to the classic Aesopian fables he has illustrated. Each tale is retold by Mr. Fox to his son Freddy. Like a child pretending to read, or a literary deconstructionist, Mr. Fox creates his own text to go with the pictures. Sometimes Mr. Fox and Aesop reach the same moral, but more often they are amusingly at odds. Mr. Fox’s “reading” of the tales is surprising and inventive, yet always consistent with the pictures. On occasion, he even weaves the illustrations of several fables into a single story. The juxtaposition of texts forces the reader to draw his own conclusions about the rich drawings, and, by extension, encourages the child to peer beneath the surface of things and explore the world from a variety of viewpoints.

In Albert & Victoria, Deborah Gangloff also chooses a novel perspective from which to examine the world--the view of two 1/2-inch walking bugs who live on the 68th floor of the Empire State Building--that’s 830 feet in the air, or 9,960 inches in case you were wondering. As Gangloff writes in her prologue, “You, on the ground, wouldn’t know there was a story there at all, if I didn’t tell you.” The story itself is a simple one. Victoria and Albert’s friendship is threatened when Victoria rebels against hibernating for the winter and flies off on the back of the seductive and dashing Philippe de Mothchilde. In the chivalric tradition of true love, Albert braves the dangers of winter and the Empire State Building to reclaim her. This is a book that parents will enjoy reading to their young children. Gangloff’s bug’s-eye view of the world and her delightful wordplay made me laugh out loud several times. The drawings of New Yorker magazine cartoonist Bill Woodman wittily complement the text.

The Fairy Rebel is also marked by its author’s playfulness, but Lynne Reid Banks has a much darker imagination. The author of the popular “Indian in the Cupboard” and “The Return of the Indian” has created another vivid and suspenseful fantasy for middle-grade readers. Tiki, a chubby, blue-jeaned fairy, accidentally becomes “earthed” when she lands on the foot of an unhappy woman. Although the Fairy Queen strictly forbids her subjects from using their magic powers on humans, Tiki grants Jan’s wish for a baby daughter. Tiki’s defiance draws the wrath of the cruel and tyrannical Queen and puts her life and the life of the fairy child Bindi in jeopardy. The Queen’s retaliation is powerfully imagined and frighteningly rendered. As in the best fairy tales, “The Fairy Rebel” allows children an imaginative release for their fears at the same time that it assures them that good does triumph over evil.

By the time children reach adolescence, many probably have strong doubts about the inherent goodness and justice of the world. Milton Meltzer’s American Politics: How It Really Works, aimed at junior high and older students, won’t reassure them.

An award-winning historian and biographer who has written more than 70 books for young people and adults, Meltzer sets out the constitutional basis of American democracy and then examines how the theory works in practice. Many of the problems he points out--the class bias of our system, the corruption, the abuse of authority, the shallowness of election campaigns--are as familiar as the evening news. But more than alerting readers to the failures and inequities of our system, Meltzer is really trying to convince the young they can make a difference by participating in politics. Though the aim is laudatory, I wish that the writing had more of the playfulness and imagination of David Small’s illustrations. Lacking that freshness and vitality, I’m afraid this is another well-intentioned book that will gather dust on library shelves.

Children’s Bookshelf, a monthly feature, will appear next on May 28. The Book Trade is scheduled for May 7. TOPSY-TURVIES More Pictures to Stretch the Imagination by Mitsumasa Anno (Philomel Books: $13.95; 28 pp.

ANNO’S AESOP A Book of Fables by Aesop and Mr. Fox retold and illustrated by Mitsumasa Anno (Orchard Books: $16.95; 63 pp.)

ALBERT & VICTORIA by Deborah Gangloff; illustrated by Bill Woodman (Crown: $10.95; 72 pp.)

THE FAIRY REBEL by Lynne Reid Banks; illustrated by William Geldart (Doubleday: $12.95; 125 pp.)

AMERICAN POLITICS How It Really Works by Milton Meltzer; illustrated by David Small (Morrow Junior Books: $12.95; 185 pp.)