Children’s Bookshelf

SHARK VS. TRAIN
By Chris Barton.
Illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld.
Little, Brown. $16.99. (Ages 3 to 6)

Who will win the face-off between two favorite toys: the shark or the train? (A ­dinosaur must be waiting in the wings.) ­Lichtenheld’s high-energy drawings are the main appeal in a series of contests that could have built to more drama. (The opponents bowl, trick or treat and . . . make lemonade?) At the end, two boys drop the game and break for lunch: “Next time, you’re history!”as the shark says, face-first in the toy box.

POETREES
Written and illustrated by Douglas Florian.
Beach Lane. $16.99. (Ages 6 and up)

Florian’s richly watercolored collages, accompanied by verse, evoke a whole forest of trees. Sometimes it takes just a handful of words. “From the acorn grows the tree — slowly, slowly,” he writes, as an oak fills a two-page spread, stained onto paper. Julie Just.

SHIP BREAKER
By Paolo Bacigalupi.
Little, Brown. $17.99. (Ages 12 and up)

Barely a chapter into this novel, readers may feel as if they’re deep inside the black hold of an oil tanker — in a good way. The author painstakingly evokes a dystopian future where rising waters have submerged the Gulf Coast and salvaging scrap from ships is one of the few honest jobs left. Nailer, small for his age, is “good scavenge,” but he stares at the mile-high clipper ships of the wealthy “slicing across the ocean” in the distance. He dreams of being on one; the ambition to bring down the system they represent comes later, amid an epic storm and a screen-ready chase scene.

STUCK ON EARTH
By David Klass.
Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.99. (Ages 11 to 14)

“We are skimming over the New Jersey countryside in full search mode, hunting a 14-year-old.” Ketchvar III, who resembles a common snail, is here from another planet to inhabit the mind and body of “an infinitely lower life-form,” an American teenager. The mission: to judge whether the human race is worth saving. A witty and penetrating satire of American life follows, as Ketchvar, having taken over Tom Filber, burrows into a typical unhappy suburban family and high school. It’s easy to sympathize with both of them.

THE DREAMER
By Pam Muñoz Ryan.
Illustrated by Peter Sis.
Scholastic. $17.99. (Ages 9 to 14)

Ryan’s hypnotic text, inspired by the childhood of Pablo Neruda, is brought to life by the extraordinary art of Peter Sis. Image after image — a locomotive in woods, an angry father in pointillist silhouette —give shape to the imagination of a lonely boy, Neftalí. Ryan captures the way in which the world is a dream to him; even the numbers in his math homework “hold hands in a long procession of tiny figures” before they fly through the window and escape, just as he one day will.

THE SIXTY-EIGHT ROOMS
By Marianne Malone.
Illustrated by Greg Call.
Random House. $16.99. (Ages 8 to 12)

Malone’s first novel is a smoothly written fantasy with an appealing premise. Ruthie and Jack, best friends on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago’ Thorne Rooms — 68 perfectly realistic miniature chambers — find a magic key to get inside them. Not only can Ruthie lie in an elegant canopied bed, she can also step into the painted landscape visible through the window (“Being outside in 18th-century France felt surprisingly normal”). There are few great surprises along the way, but the fantasy of a parallel world is irresistible nonetheless. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Bookshelf-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema4&pagewanted=print