From The Tots To

The Teens

An interesting selection of books for the younger readers this month.

T>UTH PARK, Australian novelist, sometime writer of children’s stories, has written The Muddle- Headed Wombat for the times.

An attractive book, entertainingly written and amusingly illustrated by Noela Young, it should please every one. (Published by Australian Educational Press, GPO Box 3038, Sydney. 15/-.) AS attractive and as entertaining, but different because it is in free verse, is Gloop, The Gloomy Bunyip (the “Saddest bunyip in Aus tralia, Because he thinks he’s been a failure”). Written by Colin Thiele and illustrated by John Bailey, it’s wonderful stuff for reading aloud. It’s a book they’ll keep for years and years.

Brlfba“ She i 9/6 y ) Jacaran,ia Pre^ POR slightly older children there * are two books by Eleanor Frances Lattimore, an American who appears to base all her books on China—as it was once, and certainly not ** IS today. The two new books are The Chinese Daughter and The Fisherman’s Son. Both are illustrated by the author and the first-mentioned is a lesson in junior race relations; the second about a family who lived on a sampan. Miss Lattimore comes trom a family which laboured in the missionary field in China—in the day s when there was still a future for this sort of thing. by Aneus and Prison. ■pOR youngsters bordering on the teens The Family Conspiracy, by Joan Phipson, will make welcome holiday reading. Set on a sheep

P 1 outback New South Wales

it tells how four of the youngest in the family set out to earn some real money for a worthwhile project and how they succeeded—one of them by the well-known Australian method of investing in the State lotterv' RoStsin hed l? / y 6 A " gUS and