Morris Lurie has added a new mini hero to the Tom Thumb fraternity, and a girl at that. Like Thumbelina, Imelda is minute by human standards, using a shoe box for a bed and needing several large books to reach the dinner table (The Story of Imelda Who Was Small, OUP for Children, $10.99). However Imelda’s father is certain there must be a cure for his daughter’s condition, and she is taken to see Dr Anderson, ‘a terribly tall chap, he’ll know what to do!’ Alas, the doctor’s remedies prove futile, and the family is in despair when a deus ex machina providentially arrives in the guise of a little old lady, who suggests an answer to their problem.

If Imelda is a curiously static heroine for today’s liberated market (she submissively does exactly what everyone tells her and her only act of independence is giving the outgrown shoebox to her doll) the story nevertheless has the charm and genuinely child’s-eye view that make Lurie’s stories for children so popular with young readers and listeners. With a better illustrator this could have been a notable book; an Antony Brown or a Craig Smith, for example, would have added new dimensions to the tale. Terry Denton, unfortunately, is unable to visualise its potential; his characters are uniformly insipid, his backgrounds anonymous and dull.

The Racing-Car Driver’s Moustache (Hodder & Stoughton for children, $9.95) is a yarn in the tall tale tradition, told in verse, and based on a jest that is original and – at first sight – full of promise. It seems that there was once a handsome racing car driver who unsuspectingly acquired a flea in his magnificent moustache at the very start of the great race. Flea bites driver; driver loses control; car jumps fence and collects a pig and the sequence of disasters progresses to the finish line. Axelsen’s colourful Edwardian race meeting scenes are packed with amusing, chaotic detail, but the humour is insufficient to carry the load of Todd’s limping verse so blocked by off rhymes, shifts metre, and tortuously inverted phrases as to effectively dampen the comedy.

Axelsen could have done it better, as he proved with his own verse in The Oath of Bad Brown Bill (1978), still an enduring favourite. Todd’s Driver McGhee misses out.

Bruce Treloar is notable, among the many talented artists working today, for the questing spirit that seems to be the one constant in his still developing style. In Cake I Hate! (Hodder & Stoughton for children, $9.95) he has travelled a long way from the cool seascapes and subtle crosshatching of the watercolours in Bumble’s Island to pages rioting with thick outlines and strong colour, and pulsing with a raw, exuberant energy seldom encountered within the static pages of a book.

Treloar’s themes have always, in some way, touched on emotional experiences, from the life-affirming seaside idyll of Kim to the gentle social satires of Bumble’s Dream. In Cake I Hate! his focus is, for the first time, the experiences of early childhood. Solitary, introspective Kim and dreamy Mr Bumble have been replaced by two happy little savages, brimming with joie de vivre, whose bedtime fantasy (not unlike Mickey’s in Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen) takes them through a classical child rebellion and out the other side to a sunny acceptance. A book to be absorbed rather than analysed, enjoyed for its impact more than the story.

Rain, Hail or Shine (Collins for children, $9.95) is the third picture book by the team of Nan Hunt and Craig Smith, who obviously are on the same wavelength.

However, unlike its predecessors, both imaginative and successful fantasies (Whistle Up the Chimney and Ari Eye Full of Soot and an Ear Full of Steam), this is so wholly factual that it is actually an essay rather than a story. The ‘story’ is the artist’s, and Smith has taken the text as the starting point for his own interpretation, rich with comedy and lyrical with colour.

If Treloar conjures memories of Sendak, then Judy Leech has been influenced by Horner and why not? Andrew Taylor’s The Midnight Owl takes a sly dig or two at puffed-up officialdom as Bernie the owl is shunted from Victorian town hall to VIP parade. Leech interprets each situation so imaginatively and with such drollery that readers of upper primary age will chuckle appreciatively despite the lack of colour.

Esta de Fossard’s ‘Koala Stories’ now include a third series. Koala and Emu (Edward Arnold, $3.95 pb) and Koala and Tasmanian Devil (Edward Arnold, $3.95 pb) adhere to the pattern of earlier titles, stories in the Muddle-Headed Wombat tradition that, to my mind. sit rather oddly beside the truly remarkable animal photographs of Neil McLeod (I know that is a jaded adult view: for young children the suspension of disbelief is total, and these books are deservedly popular from preschool to mid-primary level). Koala’s Book of Poems (Edward Arnold, $3.95 pb) is quite different, a collection of funny, bouncy, light-hearted verses with an emphasis on wordplay that will delight children and enliven classroom language lessons. These are ‘Audiobooks’, available on cassette.

In the same ‘Audiobook’ format, but slightly smaller, Robin Klein’s ‘Battlers’ series is intended for readers of around ten to fourteen. Each story is woven around the experience of a socially disadvantaged youngster: a deaf girl in Serve Him Right! (Edward Arnold, $4.50 pb), a stammerer in You’re On Your Own! (Edward Arnold, $4.50 pb), the family misfit in Good for Something (Edward Arnold, $4.50 pb).

In lesser hands these made-to-order stories could have been dull, didactic, and utterly boring, but in Klein’s they become fresh and absorbing, an excellent choice for slower readers, English as a second language, and class discussion.

The eleven-to-twelve-year-olds I tried them on were unanimous in their approval, and equally unanimous in their dislike of the unattractive and quite irrelevant line drawings (‘they don’t say anything!’) that do little more than break up the text. Their inadequacy is made more obvious in comparison to the excellent colour photographs that really do illustrate and extend the stories. The cassettes are read by Klein herself, making them collector’s items.