Spruced Up Evergreens

FLANNERY O'CONNOR ONCE said that when she went to college, nobody mentioned any good Southern writers. ""As far as I knew, the heroes of Hawthorne and Melville and James and Crane and Hemingway were balanced on the Southern side by Brer Rabbit--an animal who can always hold up his end of the stick, in equal company, but here too much was being expected of him.'' Oh, yeah? O'Connor wasn't wrong about much, but she may have sold old Brer Rabbit short. Of course, she did not have the benefit of reading Virginia Hamilton's wonderful retelling of his exploits in A Ring of Tricksters (Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $19.95), her new collection of the tales slaves brought to the West Indies and the Americas. Add Barry Moser's lively illustrations, and the choice between Hawthorne and Brer Rabbit comes down to a coin toss. There is no crying need for yet another retelling of ""Brer Rabbit'' or any of these tales. But when the telling is as expert as Hamilton's, who can resist?

And that's the question that the best children's books make us ask over and over. ""Need'' is never the issue with kids' books. The roughly 5,000 new titles in this field each year cover every conceivable category, no matter that everything's been done dozens of times before. But the one thing we can count on when we embark on our annual roundup of the year's best children's books is that we'll find artists and writers who can come up with a persuasively revisionist look at the bunny-rabbit situation or make an indispensable addition to the dinosaur canon. For example, if you think there are no new ways for Rapunzel to let down her hair, you haven't seen Paul Zelinsky's ravishing new Rapunzel (Dutton. $16.99). And you wouldn't dream of telling Lisbeth Zwerger that the world has enough versions of Noah's Ark (North-South Books. $16.95), at least not after you have seen her stylish animal catalog.

The surest sign of the robustness of children's literature (after the fact that it's a $1.5 billion business) is that it's absorbing one trend after another. A few years ago it was smart-aleck books (think ""The Stinky Cheese Man''). Now smarty-pants is just another option, like whitewalls or cruise control. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean may shock a few grandparents with The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (Borealis/White Wolf Publishing. $21.99), but in fact the most shocking thing they've done in this droll story is to take the illegible look of cutting-edge magazines like Raygun and somehow make it readable. As for Dav Pilkey's small comic epic about a feckless school principal, The Adventures of Captain Underpants (Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $16.95), it won't raise an eyebrow in more sophisticated juvenile reading circles.

After smart-aleck came multiculturalism. Folktales and ethnic stories with a good-for-you message were all the rage. The trend is still raging, but publishers have wisely backed the best practitioners: the writers and artists who were mining this vein long before it was hip. In If I Only Had a Horn (Houghton Mifflin. $16), Roxane Orgill tells how a music-loving boy named Louis Armstrong wound up in the New Orleans Colored Waifs Home (its real name, no lie) and how, paradoxically, that helped him get his hands on his first cornet (the home had a marching band). It's a dark tale (little Louis was hauled off to jail for testing a pistol he'd just found), until the very end, and this is reflected in Leonard Jenkins's mixed-media illustrations, which leave Louis surrounded by darkness until the budding musician enters a lighter, happier world. In Nappy Hair (Knopf. $17), Carolivia Herron and Joe Cepeda simultaneously mock and celebrate little Brenda's outrageously nappy hair in a call-and-response style borrowed from soulful preaching.

Several years ago the British publishing firm Dorling Kindersley invaded America with its big, bright books, every page crammed with graphics, text blocks and lots and lots of pictures. That look is now an industry standard, but Dorling Kindersley still does it best. Take a look at The Snake Book ($12.95). Boas and rattlers and rat snakes and milk snakes seem all too ready to slither right into your lap.

But nonfiction authors do not have a lock on striking-looking books. Istvan Banyai plainly knows the turn-of-the-century comic-strip work of Lyonel Feininger and Winsor McCay, but REM (Viking. $14.99) is a dreamscape all his own, with characters and lines morphing into each other, strings becoming hats, frogs turning into princes. Dan Yaccarino's An Octopus Followed Me Home (Viking. $15.99) is a beguilingly simple can-I-keep-it story. But simple isn't easy--Yaccarino just makes it look that way. Same for Olive, the Other Reindeer (Chronicle. $12.95), J. Otto Siebold and Vivian Walsh's droll variant on the oldest trope in the Christmas-book line.

Equally disarming are Marla Frazee's whimsical drawings for The Seven Silly Eaters (Browndeer Press/Harcourt Brace. $15), a wonderful evocation of the joyous bedlam of a seven-sibling household. The hilarious artwork is matched on every page by equally funny verse from Mary Ann Hoberman. Every child insists on eating a different food, including Mac, who ""was charming, round and plump;/But if his oatmeal had a lump,/Mac would dump it on the cat./(Mrs. Peters hated that.)''

But if you don't like something new/Why, we've got just the books for you. Oh, sorry. But seriously, a couple of the most comical books of the year are old stuff repackaged. The late James Marshall's seven George and Martha books have been gathered into one big (they are hippos) volume, George and Martha, The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends (Houghton Mifflin. $25). For those with a more acid disposition, there is always The Roald Dahl Treasury (Viking. $35). His novels, alas, can only be excerpted here, but there are plenty of short stories and lots of Dahl verse. Ghastly, funny, cynical, Dahl was not at all a proper children's author. But, as he reminds us in his version of Hansel and Gretel, he's a lot sweeter and milder: ""The Brothers Grimm who write this story/Made it a thousand times more gory . . ./It might have been okay, who knows,/If there'd been humor in the prose./Did I say humor? Wilhelm Grimm?/ There's not a scrap of it in him.'' There was in Dahl, though. It was his secret weapon against all the meanness and bullying in the world, and it's his great gift to children. The one thing kids don't know--and this is his great gift to adults who are lucky enough to have kids to read to--is that as long as they live, they'll almost never read anything better. Not even Nathaniel Hawthorne.