Picture Books:
The Mummy Squirrel's body floats gently downstream, covered with flowers by her grieving offspring. "It's Linda," prompts the voice of your stupidest self. You stifle it brutally and continue to turn the pages of Paul McCartney's book for children, High in the Clouds, when along comes the children's saviour in the form of a frog with a wooden leg.
Time for a double espresso. Even if there are pieces of McCartney's life story in this, his first children's book, written with Philip Ardagh and illustrated by Geoff Dunbar, they don't save it from being awful. The environmental theme is hackneyed at a time when gripping ones are so available - evil comes in the form of "factories". The narrative is a mish-mash of Bambi, Animal Farm, and The Lion King, which wouldn't matter at all if the writing didn't clunk out in lines such as "To say the noise is loud would be like saying that the Grand Canyon is a bit of a crack in the ground". Don't buy this for your kids.
In truth, there is an avalanche of mediocre new books for children out there, and only a trickle of really good ones. But when a book is good by the judgment of children, it is simple and true and very good indeed. Moonbird, by Joyce Dunbar, is just such an extraordinary work, telling the story of a deaf prince or, rather, of a prince in a magical bubble of his own. Across pages illustrated by Jane Ray, which have all the splendour of medieval oriental tapestries, the boy, like a truth-telling child from a Wilde fairy tale, teaches the court new and deeper forms of communication.
Ian Beck's pages are similarly gorgeous in the new paperback version of The Little Mermaid, but this is medieval via the pre-Raphaelites, full of long, weeping heads of hair. He retells the beautiful Hans Christian Andersen story, which is probably a cruel parable about the loss of a girl's virginity at marriage, but is full of deep truths about choice and change.
Michael Rosen's poems are certainly simple in Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy, but, particularly as he reads them on the accompanying CD, they are absolutely true to children's experience. Children laugh at poems such as Keith's Cupboard, about a break-in at a spoiled boy's stash of toys, but a poem such as Gone, in which someone dear is inexplicably taken away, elicits a long silence of recognition. Quentin Blake, well known to most kids as Roald Dahl's illustrator, catches both moods.
Michael Foreman's The Little Reindeer has come out in paperback (Anderson Press, £5.99). This Smarties Award-winning book is pure magic, about a child looking out over the cold bleakness of Manhattan's Gothic towers when he is given Santa's smallest reindeer to look after for a year. The deer must leave next Christmas, of course, and it is hard to explain the emotion of its flight: perhaps we must all believe in a part of ourselves that is magic and eternal, a star we come from or a guardian angel above us.
The veteran children's writer and illustrator, Shirley Hughes, really understands how children invest pieces of their personality in objects outside themselves to help them understand the world. Her story, Alfie Wins a Prize (Red Fox, £4.99), out in paperback, is a classic, about a toy sheep being rescued from the ignominy of being deemed a "consolation prize" at a fete by the loving little Alfie. Alfie's World (Bodley Head, £12.99) is a great gift, a kind of omnibus edition to celebrate 25 years of these great books.
• Victoria White is a writer and journalist
High in the Clouds Text by Paul McCartney and Philip
Ardagh, illustrated by Geoff Dunbar Faber, £6.99
Moonbird Text by Joyce Dunbar, illustrated by Jane Ray
Doubleday, £10.99
The Little Mermaid By Ian Beck Picture Corgi, £5.99
Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy Text by Michael
Rosen, illustrated by Quentin Blake Bloomsbury, £12.99
Alfie Wins a Prize/Alfie's World By Shirley Hughes Red Fox,
£4.99/Bodley Head, £12.99
The Little Reindeer By Michael Foreman Anderson Press,
£5.99