Once upon a time, if you were lucky, you might have known the likes of Declan Carville's The Incredible Sister Bridget, illustrated by Kieron Black (Discovery, £4.99). Given the present state of vocations, very few children of recent generations will. And if they do meet a nun, she's unlikely to be in full-length, black-and-white habit. None the less, all my child readers recognised and liked the anachronistic Sister Bridget, a young, upbeat, energetic, skateboarding, fun-loving and child-loving teacher. A prose paean to the eponymous heroine, the text is simple while the illustrations are lively. Particularly good are the characters' expressions. It's wonderful to see a brown face amongst the white in an Irish children's book, reflecting the new Ireland. While there's something of Bing Crosby's The Bells of St Mary's in the air (Belfast-based Discovery is a new Irish children's publisher geared for the US) the skateboards and denims set a modern tone.
Again, it's wonderful to see brown faces in Engines, Engines: An Indian Counting Rhyme by Lisa Bruce and Stephen Waterhouse (Bloomsbury, £4.99 in UK). Parents of white children cannot know the harm of a child's exclusion from mainstream culture. Political awareness aside, this is a gorgeous book about a little girl and boy who take a train trip around the glorious sites of India while learning to count through rhyme: "Engine, engine, number TWO, past the temple of Vishnu". Palaces and mosques, dancing girls, mischievous monkeys and bathing elephants, the Red Fort of Delhi and the ice-blue Himalayas are all lusciously painted in glimmering hues. (To quibble, Bombay is now Mumbai. After all, no one uses "Peking" anymore.) The finale winds up appropriately with the River Ganges. A delightful way to introduce a child to numbers and faraway places.
Author-illustrator Sandy Nightingale's Throwaway Bear (Andersen Press, £9.99 in UK) has a lovely cover yet one is still surprised by the beauty within. Each exquisitely worked image of gift-wrapped boxes, little girls' dresses, toys and animals is sure to captivate any child or adult. Certainly a collector's item, but young readers will also appreciate the misadventures of the teddy bear thrown away by the spoilt birthday girl. Warning to parents: the very young are bound to cry out at the graphic damage to the teddy as it is prodded by rabbits, torn by a raven and drowned in a lake. Skip quickly to the happy ending where a little boy restores the bear for his sweet baby sister.
"One teatime this telephone was ringing its head off so I picked it up and oh my Lord it was the front desk saying Eloise there's a telegram down here for you . . ." Thus begins Kay Thompson's Eloise in Paris, the third book - after Eloise and Eloise at Christmastime - about the urbane child resident of the New York Plaza Hotel reprinted by Simon & Schuster (£12.99 in UK). American classics of the 1950s, rumoured to be based on the childhood of Liza Minelli, daughter of Judy Garland, they were as popular with celebrity adults such as Noel Coward and Gloria Vanderbilt as they were with children. Like Pippi Longstocking, sans the socialisation of family, church or school, Eloise is a timeless archetype of anarchic childhood. Unlike Pippi, she is also a sophisticated little madam. "I always say au revoir to the Plaza whenever I go to Paris, France." There the haughty hellion, accompanied by her Nanny, creates as much mischief and mayhem at the Place de l'Etoile as she causes in the corridors of her illustrious home. The text is spoken by Eloise in never-ending sentences with idiosyncratic syntax and her own vocabulary. Dining at Maxim's, she finds the menu "rawther fluzzery". She "skibbles" and "sklathes" across the floor. "Here's the thing of it, I am rawther photogenic." Hilary Knight's drawings, all in 1950s black-and-white with splashes of pink and blue colour, now priceless items, are exuberant and hilarious and utterly germane. Here's the thing of it. Eloise does not cater to mass-market tastes. Buy this for your unique, clever, curious and precocious child. You'll love it.
G.V. Whelan is a novelist, scriptwriter and critic. Her books for young adults are published under the name Orla Melling
"Little Marinetta lives at the top of an old doll's house, and every evening she dances for Uncle Theo Bear who plays the violin. When he takes her to see a ballet performance at the Toy Theatre she is so enchanted that she decides to go to dancing school and become a proper ballerina. But can her dream ever come true?": from Marinetta at the Ballet by Elaine Mills, Andersen Press, £4.99 in UK.