Neither our educational system nor our society...

Neither our educational system nor our society greatly encourages children to cultivate their facility for make-believe. At school, children quickly learn to value fact over fancy, common sense over poetry. The older they grow, usually the more self-conscious they become about making up stories and the narrower and more constrained their fantasies.

The best books retain the fluidity and richness of a child’s imaginary life. They also show how imagination can transform and recreate our world.

Lucie Babbidge’s House by the late Sylvia Cassedy (Thomas Y. Crowell: $12.95; 243 pp.) is about an 11-year-old girl whose imagination is her only resource. At school, her teacher, the archetypal spinster Miss Pimm, constantly holds her up as a bad example to the class. Lucie’s plain; she’s obstinate; she barely speaks, and when she does, it’s in a croak. The other girls ridicule her as goosey-Loosey; Miss Pimm despairs of her future.

At home, everything is different. Over tea and ginger cookies with Mumma and her 5-year-old brother Emmett, Lucie rewrites her day, converting her humiliations into triumphs. Mumma and Dadda think Lucie bright and beautiful and are always loving and appreciative. Life among the Babbidges is elegant and faintly British, like their afternoon teas and conversations in the drawing room.

Yet, there are a few suspicious aspects to Lucie’s life. Olive, the Babbidges’ maid, often sounds like Miss Pimm, and the Babbidges themselves resemble the Pendeltons, an English family whose adventures Miss Pimm reads each day to her class. There is also the mystery of Delia Hornsby, a girl from England, who miraculously answers Lucie’s letter to her dead great-great grandmother.

Cassedy, who died of cancer last year, cleverly and subtly constructed this novel so that the reader only gradually comes to realize how much of Lucie’s world is make-believe. Not until a third of the way through do we discover that Lucie’s parents are dead, and that she is a waif among waifs, an outcast at the orphanage. By presenting Lucie’s fantasy world as real, Cassedy shows how imaginary life sometimes can be more vivid than real life. Cassedy’s funny, poignant novel is a testament to the healing and transformative powers of the imagination.

In Paul Fleischman’s Saturnalia (A Charlotte Zolotow Book/Harper & Row: $12.95; 110 pp.), it is the author’s imagination that transforms his subject matter. Fleischman, a Newbery Award-winning author, returns to a territory he has successfully explored before--the early New England Puritans.

Fleischman takes an unconventional approach to writing historical fiction for children. Although the novel has a 14-year-old as its central character--a Narragansett captured by the Puritans in their Indian wars--the book neither focuses exclusively on his struggles nor is confined solely to his point of view. Instead, Fleischman smoothly shifts perspective back and forth between the Indians and a colorful cross section of Boston life in December, 1681.

Among his unusual ensemble are a tithing man “walking the lightless lanes of sin, routing out evil and blasphemy”; a grieving and guilt-ridden woodcarver; a cruel eyeglass maker; a pompous wig maker, and his impudent servant and tutor in love. The author shifts tone as easily as he does point of view, mixing tragedy and humor, irony and farce in a textured and evocative meditation on our colonial forebears.

The central figure who links all these disparate characters is the Indian captive who has become a printers’ apprentice. William in the white world, Weetasket in the Indian, he wanders the Boston streets at night, playing his bone flute and searching for his twin brother in his lost past.

Like William, Fleischman also is attempting to recapture the past. His inventive approach to envisioning our colonial beginnings challenges readers to stretch their own imaginative powers and to see the world from a variety of viewpoints. Just as imagination allows Lucie to integrate the separate parts of herself, it also enables us to reclaim our past and discover its relevance to our present.