For young planners, dreamers

IF you’d like your children to enjoy travel as much as you do, get them involved in vacation planning early. That way, the trips your family takes will become their project too. Children’s travel books can make the job simpler.

Some of the books are written for kids to help them gear up for trips they’ll actually take. Others are narratives that will send them vicariously to places they’re unlikely to see in person. The goal is to encourage a sense of wanderlust and a desire to learn how other people live.

Here’s a look at some recent offerings:

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“Travels With My Family”

By Marie-Louise Gay

and David Homel

Groundwood Books: 119 pages;

a few black-and-white drawings;

for ages 7-10; $15.95.

Maybe you had parents like this: “Disneyland was too normal for my parents. Too much like everybody else, too ordinary.” In “Travels With My Family,” a wise-beyond-his-years kid laments the travel choices of his parents, whose desire to get off the beaten track is so intense it leads the family into sandstorms, Mexican political unrest, hurricanes and alligator-infested swamps.

The story, written by a Canadian husband-and-wife team, isn’t clearly labeled fiction or fact (the family’s given names are never revealed), but it has the ring of truth for anyone who was ever forced to spend long hours in the back seat of a car.

But there’s more to it than that: The family challenges Mom’s fear of heights on a New Mexico canyon trail, fights tides at a Georgia beach and gets nibbled by peacocks at a British Columbia farm. The narrator’s little brother spends an evening dressed in a tablecloth as his wave-soaked clothing tumbles dry at the laundromat. Nothing too ordinary about that.

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“This Is Venice”

By Miroslav Sasek

Universe Publishing: 64 pages; color illustrations; for ages 9-12; $17.95. Other books in the series cover Paris, New York, San Francisco, London and Ireland.

Is it fair to give a child a 45-year-old book? Many Dr. Seuss books are even older -- but a guidebook? Miroslav Sasek, a Czech writer and illustrator who died in 1980, was inspired in the late 1950s to create travel guides for children. In 1961, he produced “This Is Venice,” but its 2005 republication isn’t a problem, because the Italian city he pictured hasn’t changed much. Pigeons still congregate in St. Mark’s Square. Boats still take the place of trucks and buses, and “as much as Venice loves the water, the water loves Venice -- and periodically proves it.”

There probably is too much untranslated Italian in the text, and we never do discover exactly what a doge was, but that just means someone is going to have to do a little homework. There are occasional footnotes to update things; for example, the pictured watermelon stands no longer exist. But the happy cartoon Venetians will effortlessly introduce kids to the city whose motto could be “Abandon wheels, all ye who enter here.”

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“Pick Your Brains About Ireland”

By Mary O’Neill

Cadogan:128 pages, black-and-white drawings; probably best for upper elementary grades; $9.95. Other books in the series cover Greece, France, Italy, Scotland, Spain, England, the U.S.

“Pick Your Brains About Ireland,” published by the respected Cadogan Guides organization, puts its kid-friendly fact nuggets into accessible form and covers a lot of ground, including the legend of St. Brendan, Gaelic football, the moonscape of the Burren and the potato pancakes known as boxties. There’s also a chapter on “A School Day in Ireland.”

The style is breezy, but there are some signs that the info has been scrubbed for kid consumption: The “troubles” in Northern Ireland are quickly passed over, controversial author Oscar Wilde is absent from the book’s catalog of Irish literary greats, and pubs are mentioned mostly as handy landmarks. Moreover, notwithstanding several references to links between Ireland and the U.S., Cadogan apparently had British children in mind. Parents should be prepared to explain “Normans,” “boffins” and why “favourite” is spelled that way. Still, this is an ideal gift for the child about to go to Ireland.

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“Under the Persimmon Tree”

By Suzanne Fisher Staples

Douglas & McIntyre: 275 pages; contains disturbing scenes of violence; young adult; $17.95.

Not everyone -- child or adult -- will be ready to meet Najmah and Nusrat or to hear their stories. Suzanne Fisher Staples’ “Under the Persimmon Tree” is based on her experiences and on the tales she heard in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They yield a compelling young adult novel that not only touches the heart, but also sears it with the cruelties and injustices of war and religious oppression.

The tree mentioned in the title shades Nusrat’s school for orphaned refugee children in Peshawar, Pakistan. Nusrat (formerly Elaine) has married an Afghan doctor and converted to Islam, thereby alienating her traditional American family in New York. Now her husband is missing in the battle area. Najmah, a young Afghan shepherdess, has lost her father and big brother to the Taliban, and her mother and baby brother to a bomb. Disguised as a boy, she flees her home and a wicked, opium-growing uncle. Although she is a survivor, she is rendered mute by the horrors she has seen. There are few storybook endings here. Instead there are exquisitely grim word pictures of an unforgiving land, a brutalized people -- and yet, incredible courage and strength.

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“Walking the Bible: An Illustrated Journey for Kids Through the Greatest Stories Ever Told”

By Bruce Feiler

HarperCollins: 105 pages; black-and-white photos and maps; for ages 7 and older; $16.99.

“Stories, like rivers, give life.” The rivers to which Bruce Feiler refers are the Tigris and Euphrates; the stories are from the Old Testament. His guide in his search for actual biblical locations is Avner Goren, an affable scholar who knows the stories and the land. “All of my learning was in my head,” Feiler says, but “all of his learning was in his feet.” Together they would “take the biblical stories off the page and replant them into the ground.”

Feiler searches blistering Middle Eastern wildernesses, visits Mt. Ararat and talks with a man who claims to have seen Noah’s Ark. He interweaves the spiritual with the pragmatic -- for example, concluding that Noah’s floating animal hotel would have generated 800 tons of manure. Feiler doesn’t advocate any particular religion. He’s not a preacher; he’s a great teacher.

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“Jerusalem Sky: Stars, Crosses and Crescents”

By Mark Podwal

Doubleday: 32 pages.; color illustrations; for ages 4-8; $15.95.

For younger children there is “Jerusalem Sky”: The city at the confluence of three faiths is the focus of Mark Podwal’s lovely little book. “Synagogue stars, church crosses, mosque moons meet under the Jerusalem sky and merge their shadows.” Podwal’s painted illustrations, though simply drawn, are richly colored, as befits a holy city. His poetic text is hopeful and perhaps naively optimistic, but if the legends are right and there is a hole in the sky above the city, “through this hole hopes reach heaven.”