Picture Books: Victoria White picks some of the best books where the spell is complete, the distance from reality unmissable.
If you're a parent of small children and also a regular broadsheet reader, I'm sure you've already gone at the kids' room like the Taliban in the Sistine Chapel - the pictures of Jack and Jill on the children's bedpost are painted over and the nursery rhymes are shredded. When the British Medical Journal declared that children watching TV are only exposed to five violent scenes an hour, as opposed to 52 if listening to nursery rhymes, what could any responsible parent do but ban them?
The British Medical Journal does not have at its disposition your literary sensibility, nor that of your children, dear reader. The best literature for young children is a ritual which invokes fear and destroys it. What is important is that the spell be complete, the distance from reality unmissable.
One of the best of this year's new picture books for under-fives is Kate, the Cat and the Moon by Whitbread and Smarties Prize-winning author David Almond (Hodder, £10.99). His poetic text is an incantation which sees a young girl turning into a cat and scampering into the night while "the house was lost in dreams". Stephen Lambert's slightly alarming green and yellow-eyed cat stares out of the pages.
Sarah Dyer also has a Smarties Prize on her lapel - successful children's authors clank like Olympians these days - and Clementine and Mungo (Bloomsbury, £9.99) calls into being a charming little brother and sister of piggy creatures, who snuggle up together at night and feel safe.
For try as you might, you cannot paint terrible fears, like that of abandonment, out of children's minds and the best children's literature tackles them and dispels them. Boy, by James Mayhew (The Chicken House, £10.99), is the first in a series about a little cave-boy, and this one has him wandering alone among mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers and arriving home to snuggle in between Cave-Mummy and Cave-Daddy.
Helen Cooper's duck gets lost in a gorgeous, surreal city of pepper-cannisters in A Pipkin of Pepper (Random House, £10.99), which tells the story of three animals' quest for the perfect pumpkin soup. But beautiful though it is, this Kate Greenaway Medal-winning author has created a tale which is too complex and too frivolous.
Sam Mc Bratney, author of Guess How Much I Love You?, has a straight line into children's deepest fears. This year's offering, You're All My Favourites (Walker, £9.99), goes like a needle into children's fear of being less loved than their siblings. Anita Jeram's softly water-coloured Mummy and Daddy bear take the babies one by one in their arms, hug them to their furry chests and explain, "Biggly or littley, we love you just the same".
Irish writer and illustrator Niamh Sharkey's Santasaurus (Walker Books, £10.99) is just superb, an explosively colourful invocation of Christmas in dinosaur world, complete with dinodeer, dinocycles and of course, a slimy, green Santa. Sharkey seems to believe, with the seriousness of a young child, in a parallel universe.
Alan Snow's How Santa Really Works (Simon & Schuster, £10.99) is, by contrast, a funny, knowing exploration of the Santa industry, and anyone who has a child of five or more will be familiar with questions such as "How does Santa get down the chimney?" (He is slim and does lots of rock climbing and yoga).
Older children love detailed, encyclopaedia-like books like these, but if you're more of a romantic, you could get your five to eight-year-old Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as retold by Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo (Walker, £14.99), plushly illustrated by Michael Foreman.
Anthony Browne enters the fray sporting no less than two Kate Greenaway medals as well as the biggie, a Hans Christian Andersen. But sadly, Into the Forest (Walker, £12.99) makes the huge mistake of staying too close to reality. Dad disappears and Mum looks like she needs medication fast. The boy enters the forest of too much fear unprotected by any spell, and when Dad finally appears and Mum comes out to greet him the whole thing seems like it has been a cruel game.
The lack of distance from reality is also a problem in Robert Ingpen's illustrations for the Centenary Edition of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy (Templar, £14.99). His sepia-tinged pencil and pastel drawings of great characters such as the Darlings, Nana, Tinker Bell and Pan himself are like memories of childhood. This adult relationship with the book has been more the focus of the centenary than the child's. For a child, Hook must be horrible and Wendy must be pretty.
Only in a completely unreal world is it safe to explore this wonderful but terrible tale of a boy who stays away too long and is shut out by his mother - when he peeps in the window he sees another boy in his place. He goes to join the Lost Boys, who fell out of their perambulators when their nurses were looking the other way.
Come to think of it, you'd better paint Peter Pan out of the nursery wall-paper as well.
Victoria White is a journalist and writer