Where Wild Things Roam

The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow; $15). They sure are, in rum-tiddly-pum verse designed for surefire (no trick at all, for dragons) recitation. Sample: "I'm bored with my bad reputation/ For being a miserable brute/ And being routinely expected / To brazenly pillage and loot." On reflection, however, he decides that "since I can't alter my nature,/ I guess I'll just terrify you." Ferocious dragonographics by illustrator Peter Sis.

Now Everybody Really Hates Me, by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx (HarperCollins; $14). Adults in Roz Chast's funny-because-they're-not-funn y New Yorker cartoons look like blobby 11-year-olds, so she's a natural to illustrate the stirring tale of Patty Jane, unjustly punished for bopping her little brother. ("I did not hit Theodore. I touched him hard.") To teach the world a lesson, she decides to stay in her room forever. Snit-having Jennifers will recognize a master.

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins, $20). In the dumps puts matters too mildly. Give or take the late Dr. Seuss, Sendak is by far our most talented artist and writer for children (Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen). His new book is about homeless children, and it matches the world's madness with the bitter fantasies of art. We see a frightening jumble of hungry, half-naked street kids, voracious rats, a huge cat-faced moon. Two white urchins discover a brown boy barely old enough to walk. Jingly verse that recalls The Threepenny Opera teeters on murder: "Come says Jack let's knock him on the head, No says Guy let's buy him some bread." The happy ending is cold comfort: a ruck of bony children trying to sleep in a shantytown. This is brilliant and powerful stuff, but it is hard to imagine reading it to a child. Some adults may feel, under the baleful influence of Sendak's parable, that it is hard to imagine having a child.

Hop Jump, by Ellen Stoll Walsh (Harcourt Brace; $13.95). A froggy first book for bouncing preschoolers, the title pretty much sums up the plot, until an unusually balletic frog (blue with spots, to distinguish her from ordinary green-with-spots plodders) teaches her pondmates to dance. Read me the frog book, Daddy!

The Bracelet, by Yoshiko Uchida (Philomel; $14.95). A clear, direct look at social injustice is especially hard in children's literature, whose traditions say wrongs must be made right. In 1942 the Japanese-American author was sent with her family to a detention camp, and this story and Joanna Yardley's warm, elegiac illustrations recall a time for which good explanations are still not available. The title refers to a bracelet given the Japanese-American heroine Emi, who's about eight, by her Anglo friend Laurie. The gift and the remembered friendship allow Emi to hope that peace and trust will return to her world.

Where Are You Going, Manyoni?, by Catherine Stock (Morrow; $15). The pick of a good year: the author, a fine watercolor artist, follows a little Zimbabwean girl as she wakes up at dawn and walks miles through forests and grasslands to her school. Small children can have fun finding Manyoni's tiny figure in a grove of fig trees or waist-deep in riverside grass; older kids can learn to spot the civet cat, the yellow hornbill and the impalas, kudus and wildebeests she passes. The exceptional illustrations treat the vast African landscape with awe and love. Beautifully redrawn cave paintings, based on work by prehistoric artists who saw much the same landscape -- a rhinoceros, a fish and what might be an antelope -- serve as endpapers.

The Secret Room, by Uri Shulevitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15). Once upon one more time, we have the slightly dippy king who craves the answer to a riddle ("Why is your head gray and your beard black?"), the humble but clever man who provides it and the nasty court counselor who is jealous. Humility prevails and spin-doctoring fails, as invariably happens in stories. The author's angular tempera illustrations are vivid and funny -- the camel on which the king perches is an unusually thoughtful and sardonic beast -- but the somewhat preachy story doesn't add much to the fun.

Charles Dickens: The Man Who Had Great Expectations, by Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema (Morrow; $15). Here's a fine choice for a book-loving older child. The story Dickens lived was as dramatic as any he wrote, and the literate text of this fascinating biography deals gently but firmly with his chaotic childhood and disastrous marriage, his spectacular success and the appalling condition of the poor. Detailed illustrations bring 19th century England to life for the young time traveler.