‘The Wheels on the Bus’ Get Illustrator’s Interactive Spin

Competition for children’s attention has never been more keen. Matched against dozens of channels of cable television and the endless possibilities of the Internet, a quaint old ditty like “The Wheels on the Bus” may not stand a chance anymore.

Enter Paul Zelinsky. A witty and talented illustrator who has brought many traditional tales back to life, Zelinsky recently joined with “paper engineer” Rodger Smith to focus on his own favorite childhood lyric, and the results are magical.

“The Wheels on the Bus” (Dutton Children’s Books, 16 pages, $16.99) is more than a book. It’s an interactive adventure with spinning tires, opening doors and flaps designed by Smith to pull every which way, revealing countless treats.

And that doesn’t even include the surprise conclusion.

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“The Snoops,” by Miriam Moss (Dutton Children’s Books, 28 pages, $14.99), also uses some creative wizardry to pull off an unusual ending. The story, imported from Great Britain and driven by Delphine Durand’s irreverent artwork, looks in on the Snoops, the world’s nosiest neighbors, as they look in on everyone else.

Eventually everyone turns on the prying Snoops, exacting revenge on a final page that folds out accordion-like to reveal a 3-D peep through the Snoops’ keyhole.

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“The Garden of Happiness” (Harcourt Brace & Co., 28 pages, $15) by Erika Tamar--with warm oil paintings by Barbara Lambase, an artist from Torrance--finds Marisol and her neighbors transforming a garbage-strewn lot on their New York street into a community garden. In the process, Marisol learns a lot about the pride and attachment that multiethnic families still feel for their far-flung homelands.

And of course there’s a surprising ending.

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Another story that puts a positive spin on multiculturalism is Amelia Lau Carling’s “Mama & Papa Have a Store” (Dial Books for Young Readers, 28 pages, $15.99). Carling, who did both the writing and the illustrating, was born in Guatemala, where her parents fled after the Japanese invaded their native China on the eve of World War II. Surrounded by customers and friends in the general store that the family ran in Guatemala City, Carling learned to understand and appreciate the Guatemalan, Chinese and Mayan cultures and recounts her memories here fondly in a clipped, lyrical style.

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For more advanced readers--and ones who don’t like surprise endings--Viking’s “Frankenstein” (249 pages; $25.99 hardcover, $17.99 paperback) is worth checking out. The latest addition to Viking’s “The Whole Story” series takes Mary Shelley’s classic from 1818 and adds a dazzling number of color illustrations, extended captions and background information to tell the story behind the story. Included in the documentary asides are notes about the geography, popular culture, social customs, architecture, literature and science of the time.

Other works in the eight-volume series include “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “The Jungle Book,” “Treasure Island” and “Little Women.”

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Also for older readers are two collections of inspirational stories about women who have changed the world--or at least the world as they knew it.

Milton Meltzer’s “Ten Queens: Portraits of Women of Power,” illustrated by Bethaune Anderson (Dutton Children’s Books, 134 pages, $24.99), revisits the likes of Cleopatra, Isabel of Spain and Catherine the Great. Meltzer explains in his preface that the 10 queens were chosen not because of their title, for “these are not women who were called queens because they happened to marry a king . . . . These 10 were women of power.”

An author of more than 90 books on history and social reform, Meltzer is a straightforward, uncomplicated writer whose scholarship is solid. Each profile here is complemented by a bibliography and an index of sources.

Meltzer’s subjects have long been famous--which is not the case with those explored by Susan Casey in “Women Invent” (Chicago Review Press, 142 pages, $14.95). Here we meet such people as Bette Nesmith Graham, the inventor of Liquid Paper; Nobel Prize-winner Gertrude Elion, whose research helped develop drugs to fight childhood leukemia and AIDS; and Dr. Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina astronaut.

Casey’s main goal is to inspire young inventors, not to praise accomplished ones, so she has included stories about dozens of lesser-known inventions, as well as a comprehensive resource list to help would-be inventors develop and even profit from their own ideas.

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Kevin Baxter reviews books for young readers every four weeks. Next week: book reviews by Times readers.