cover image Child's Garden of Verses

Child's Garden of Verses

Robert Louis Stevenson. HarperCollins Publishers, $14.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-694-00192-7

While neither Robert Louis Stevenson nor Edward Lear could have foreseen their poems as pop-ups, the form is not without advantages. The Owl and the Pussycat is best served here, with Littlejohn's realistic twosome rowing out to sea and later dancing beneath the moon, as fish jump in the background. The poems from A Child's Garden have static scenes of stiff children; the pictures are not nearly as imaginative as the verses. These two books will strike some as device over substance, and yet the pop-ups may serve to introduce readers to a sampling of the works and entice them to go on to other, more elaborate volumes of Stevenson and Lear. Ages 4-8. (June)