Books for Children: A piece of string is a wonderful thing

NON-FICTION

PARENTS of young children will be familiar with requests from school for eggboxes, dressing-up clothes, an old flannel for mustard-and-cress. Recently, though, they may have noticed the demands becoming more particular, more out-of-the-way.

'We've got to take a book about King Arthur.' 'What sort of book?' 'Any book about King Arthur. We're doing him for history.' T H White's The Once and Future King was duly packed off to school wrapped in a paper bag, and what a class of 6-year-olds made of it remains a mystery, but the thrust of the teacher's plea later became clear. We now have a national curriculum.

Clearly defined subjects - history, science, geography - are now taught from the age of five. But where are the textbooks? Publishers, of course, have not been idle, but there is a limit to the number of new titles they can turn round in a year. And the national curriculum has done more than give them a frantic 12 months' work: it appears also to have galvanised editors into reassessing children's non-fiction, no longer geared solely to work in class but aimed squarely at the parental purse. Where once a ticket for the public library was enough, every child, it seems, now needs a reference library at home.

The Timelines series has a strong claim to a place on its shelves. Medicine: Doctors, Demons and Drugs (Watts pounds 7.99) is one of several busy but clearly laid- out pictorial surveys, with a dustjacket that doubles as a glossy poster (bedroom, not classroom size) and a wide-ranging text remarkable for its clear English. Sections on Stone Age trepanning and the first human dissections (gruesomely illustrated) make for obsessive reading. Likewise, complex biological discoveries are explained with crystal clarity in the small, oddly titled Amazing Schemes Within Your Genes (Collins pounds 7.99/ pounds 3.99) whose prize-winning author and artist, Fran Balkwill and Mic Rolph, tackle DNA, mutations and faulty genes with authority and zest. Less successful is Why Are People Different? (Usborne pounds 3.50/ pounds 2.25) which also has short sections on genetics, but spreads its net too wide, taking in social customs, world languages and penal systems, without doing justice to any of them.

For a younger age group, Angela Royston and Edwina Riddell's Your Senses (Frances Lincoln pounds 8.99) at first looks tricksy, with its invitation to 'lift the flap' on every page. But its simplicity is deceptive. The chapter 'What's inside my eye?' delivers difficult information by means of streamlined hands- on graphics. On the top surface of the page you see a girl's face in profile; lift the first flap and you see beneath her skin (the bulging eyeball, its retaining muscles, the grey mass of the brain); lift the second flap and you have a diagram of how an image is perceived, reversed by the lens on the back of the eye, and sent by the nerves to the brain. Each chapter follows this formula, revealing goings-on beneath the nose, on the tongue and in the ear. Of course children love tugging the flaps, and giggle over the pink protuberances, but this book succeeds in making them enquire and ponder too.

Before the current proliferation of print, if a child owned any reference book at all, it was usually an atlas. Nowadays, nothing is quite so simple, although The Puffin Picture Atlas of the World ( pounds 4.50) is straightforward enough. Each double page covers a country or group of countries, with a map, a thumbnail sketch of a text, and inset photographs of its salient features. France has a vineyard, the Eiffel tower and the TGV; Britain has a combine harvester, an oil rig, and the Houses of Parliament - wrongly labelled 'Big Ben'. The Children's Activity Atlas (Belitha Press pounds 3.99) is similar but includes questions and map-measuring tasks.

Other atlases come with attitude - as in The Atlas of Endangered Animals (Belitha Press pounds 8.99) and its companion, Atlas of Endangered Places, aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds. All worthy stuff, beautifully produced - but it seems a shame that a first encounter with the natural world should be quite so didactic.

The Fantastic Journey series (Watts pounds 7.99) takes quite the opposite tack, sending a bunch of cartoon characters - Professor Verne and some goofy kids whose resemblance to the Simpsons must be more than accidental - into space, to the centre of the earth, around the world or under the sea in the Prof's travelling machine. 'Wow]' is the comment which most often appears in the speech bubbles. All four books in the series look exciting, and deliver a mass of sophisticated information in a short space, but you suspect the cartoon format, for all its cleverness, might eventually work against any more serious application by the reader. Another new series, Roundabouts (A & C Black pounds 6.50), written by Kate Petty with illustrations by Jakki Wood, takes up similar themes in a gentler style for younger children, following the boy Harry and his dog as they explore the globe in a hot-air balloon.

As any librarian will confirm, what adults choose for a child, and what children choose for themselves, are often worlds apart. The Little Library series (Kingfisher pounds 1.99) are neat little hardbacks with an old-fashioned feel, and independent readers aged 6 or 7 seem to adore them. Perhaps it is their almost pocketable size, or the uncluttered page-layouts or the appealing subjects - probably all of these. Dinosaurs, Castles, Jungle Animals, Ballet, Space (and more) are all written by Christopher Maynard in an unaffected style. And these books really are cheap enough for a child to collect to make a library.

The traditional-looking Nature Detective series (Watts pounds 8.50) deserves mention for its exquisite drawings and design. Anita Ganeri and John Parsons' Small Mammals, in particular, contains the quality of artwork that can create an early benchmark: all subsequent images of a rabbit, or a fieldmouse, or a vole, will have to measure up to the memory of this.

When a publishing house as distinguished as Walker Books decides to cross over into non-fiction, you can be sure it will have some good ideas up its sleeve. The Read and Wonder series does not disappoint. These books fulfil all the requirements of a factual picture book, but they also supply that imaginative element that makes many children prefer fiction. 'I don't want to look at those books, they're not real stories]' complained one member of my household. But four pages of Vivian French and Charlotte Voake's Caterpillar Caterpillar (Walker pounds 6.99) changed all that. It has a dual narrative, one printed in normal type, the other in a different hand, so each is distinct on the page. The first tells the story, somewhat lyrically: here, the tale of a young girl who learns about the life-cycle of caterpillar-to-butterfly from her grandfather. The second text adds extra factual information: 'Nettles will sting if you touch them, but they won't sting the caterpillars.'

Each book works in the same way, using many authors and illustrators familiar from fiction: Charlotte Voake's sketchy pastels, Mike Bostock's beautifully clear gouaches. A Piece of String is a Wonderful Thing ( pounds 6.99), by Judy Hindley and Margaret Chamberlain, is an intriguing imagined history of the invention of string, but most engaging on all counts is Think of an Eel ( pounds 6.99), by Karen Wallace and Mike Bostock, a eulogy to the strange and ugly creature which makes such a heroic journey from its birth in the Sargasso Sea, and back again to breed and die.