Imagine: a Cow in a Gown!

The Sunday Outing, by Gloria Jean Pinkney; illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (Dial; $14.99), tells of Ernestine, a young African-American girl who lives in Philadelphia and hopes to save up money for a big adventure: a train ride to visit relatives in North Carolina. The dialogue is shrewdly written; Aunt Odessa, up from the South, talks country ("You wasn't worried now, was you?"), though Ernestine's parents speak Standard English. The beautiful drawings show a warm, believable middle-class black family of about 40 years ago.

Grandfather's Pencil, written and illustrated by Michael Foreman (Harcourt Brace; $14.95), is a dreamy tale of an English boy who finds a magical pencil lost by his grandfather, an old sailor. The boy sleeps. Moonlight floods his window. The pencil writes by itself, remembering its early life as part of a great tree. The paper it writes on remembers being logs in a wild river. The room's floorboards were part of a ship that flew a black flag. The grandfather was a boy; the boy will grow older. Fine drawings whisper the twin secrets of storytelling: long ago, far to go.

Misoso, by Verna Aardema; illustrated by Reynold Ruffins (Knopf; $18), is a fascinating collection of traditional African tales, which are bound to be new to New World kids: "One morning a toad said to a rat, 'I can do something that you can't do.' 'What?' cried the rat. 'You don't even know how to run. You just throw yourself, lop -- and then you stop and look around."' Yes, and then? Listen for fun, but learn too: leelee goro means "little girl" in the Temne language, and jambo is Swahili for "hello." And a "sloogey dog" is a Saluki in "hungry country," which is the desert -- words, as the storyteller says, "from the far side of the imagination."

Gargoyles' Christmas, by Louisa Campbell; illustrated by Bridget Starr Taylor (Gibbs Smith; $19.95), tells a cheerful tale about Craig, Cliff and Christabel, bad-attitude adolescent gargoyles, who feel about Christmas the way Scrooge did. They come alive and, expressing their stony contempt, trash wreaths, trees and blinking lights, finally getting hopelessly tangled in the awful mess. They would be tangled to this day if a fat gent in a red suit had not parked his reindeer nearby. Clinging to the book's spine is a stuffed baby gargoyle.

Croco'nile, written and illustrated by Roy Gerrard (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15), features a huge, toothy creature that serves as a pet to a couple of Egyptian kids: "In ancient Egypt, long ago,/ Beside the River Nile,/ A brother and a sister/ Found a baby crocodile." The kids stow away on a boat: "The naughty twosome stayed concealed/ Until the break of day./ By then their little village/ Was a hundred miles away."

The poetry bounces along nicely, the croc follows the stowaways but politely refrains from eating anyone, and the elaborate drawings of pyramids under construction and of wall paintings are busy and interesting. (Readers of Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist, will recognize Gerrard's agreeable drawing style as "neotonic" -- all faces. Those of adults as well as children are drawn with the wide eyes and short, cute, chubby faces of toddlers.) Best of all, for quick-witted nine-year-olds, there are 10 secret messages written in real hieroglyphs, with a key to translation.

Friday Night at Hodges' Cafe, written and illustrated by Tim Egan (Houghton Mifflin; $14.95), is just what a funny book for little kids ought to be: silly. Hodges, an elephant, runs a cafe that would be fairly normal, except that his crazy pet duck causes a lot of trouble. Things get out of control when three tough tigers show up (ignoring the no tigers sign) and decide that roast duck would be just dandy. Hodges whaps the biggest tiger with a squishy souffle, and the duck dives into a large raspberry tart to hide. Alas, his back end sticks out, and the tigers growl hungrily, having no trouble imagining a nice big bowl of duck a la raspberry. Suddenly the biggest tiger licks his fearsome chops and smiles, because the souffle that is sticking to his face tastes good. He and his sidekicks order three Boston cream pies and settle down peacefully to munch, and the duck, still dripping raspberry goo, does a dance on the counter. Illustrations are cheerfully gaga, though clever three-year-olds will wonder why all the animals except the duck are wearing clothes.

George Washington's Cows, written and illustrated by David Small (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $15), reveals in owlish, bumpety-bump verse and vivid drawings why the great man entered politics: because his livestock drove him goobers. His cows insisted on wearing lavender gowns and being sprayed with cologne (which was quite expensive); his pigs wore wigs and served dinner to guests at Mount Vernon (very nicely too, but still ); and his sheep wore academic gowns and delivered lectures. They "measured the sea with a stick./ Then, raising their hoofs in triumph, they cried:/ 'We say with a certain amount of pride,/ If the ocean were stood up on its side/ You would see that it's deep but not thick!"'

Swamp Angel, by Anne Isaacs; illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky (Dutton; $14.99), presents a rousing rarity: a brand-new backwoods legend, written mostly for girls, that has the feel of real frontier storytelling. Angelica Longrider, born in Tennessee in 1815 and known far and wide as Swamp Angel, was "scarcely taller than her mother" at birth, and -- though her father gave her a shiny new ax to play with in her cradle -- "was a full two years old before she built her first log cabin." Her epic mud wrestle with the giant bear Thundering Tarnation has the rowdy, mile-wide quality of the Paul Bunyan tales: the combatants fall asleep after days of pummeling each other, and "Tarnation snored louder than a rockslide, while Angel snored like a locomotive in a thunderstorm. Their snoring rumbled through the earth, tumbling boulders and shaking trees loose. By morning, they had snored down nearly the whole forest."