Charlie, Queen of the Desert

British comedian Henry echoes two film titles in these fast-paced stories of Charlie, a girl whose imagination frees her from boredom. Charlie becomes ""queen of the desert"" after she digs a deep hole on a dismal English beach, spins like a human drill and surfaces in sunny Australia. There she makes friends with a kangaroo, evades a dragonlike ""thorny devil"" and gets home via the music of a magical didgeridoo. Her ""big chill"" involves a supermarket's freezer section. While getting eggs for her mother, she dances with an ""Ice-cream Posse"" of animals and flees an evil ""snow giant"" (who later carries her mom's shopping bags to the car). A wildly active child, Charlie's signature exclamations include ""Blinky, blonky, blimey!"" and ""Woweroonie!"" Burke, too, portrays Charlie as a wide-eyed dynamo, giving her enormous, gravity-defying black pigtails (which resemble a charcoal tornado) and posing her as an agile hiphop star or superhero. The illustrations, drawn in flourishes of ink and spattered with bright color as though by a spray can, resemble unpolished graffiti; the collaborators aim for urban hipness, and the books have a raw but energetic edge. Ages 4-6. (Jan.)