Revivals & new arrivals.

To the litany of persons who shaped this century, let me add the name E[dith] Nesbit, whose stories precipitated a still evolving revolution in wonder. With her recently republished 1902 Five Children and It (Books of Wonder/Morrow, illus. Paul O. Zelinsky, $22, 242 pp., ages 8 and up), E. Nesbit ushered in a new era of children's fantasy literature. Before Nesbit, such literature fell into two types: either the entire action took place in an exotic or fantastical setting, or the child character (Dorothy or Alice) traveled from this world into a fantastical one. But in Five Children and It, a group of middle-class Edwardian children find a prehistoric, ill-tempered thing called a Psammead right in the gravel pit behind their house. And each day, corresponding to each chapter, he reluctantly grants them a wish that results in a new adventure in their very neighborhood.

Locating the fantastical in everyday life was Nesbit's great and enduring innovation. (E.T. actually looks like the Psammead!). Also new was the magic itself: comical, human, and wildly unpredictable rather than supernatural, dreadful, and weird. Even Nesbit's tone heralded change. She spoke directly and archly to her young readers, reminding them of novelistic conventions even as she overthrew them. And she was blessedly true to the boredom, embarrassment, pleasure, squabbling, vexation, and thrill of a childhood summer day. She once wrote: "When I was a child I used to pray fervently, tearfully, that when I should be grown up I might never forget what I thought, felt, and suffered then." Her prayers were efficacious.

Nesbit inspired the best magical storytellers of this century. C.S. Lewis was a great admirer. His ambition-to make theological truths palpable and beautiful for children-was not Nesbit's, but he borrowed her unpredictable magic, her images, and her sibling dynamics to his great benefit. In America, Nesbit's most ardent follower was Edward Eager, whose hilarious canon (1954-62)-Half Magic, Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, Seven-Day Magic-has just been reprinted (Odyssey/Harcourt Brace, $6, paper, ages 8 and up). A playwright and lyricist, Eager wrote books which are packed with word play and literary allusion, and are a pleasure to read aloud.

Eager is Nesbit after John Dewey, the automobile, Fred Astaire, and the cocktail hour. Yet the likeness outstrips the difference. Like Nesbit, Eager has children stumbling onto magic and then, in episodic chapters, learning how to control it and use it wisely. Like her, Eager's touch is light, his morals earned, his portraits true, his tone wry. He too places tiny shadows in the background-financial instability, class conflict, loneliness-things that, in both authors' works, register just the right amount on children as they dawdle through summer and tackle their proximate troubles. His children, like hers, are avid readers, and they shape and analyze their adventures with the help of what they have read. You can guess whose books Eager's children recur to most often.

The most Nesbit-like writer of the moment is British picture-book maker John Burningham. He is also, in my view, the most interesting religious thinker for young children since C. S. Lewis. That his books touch the eternal by means of the fantastical should not surprise us. Magic is the handmaiden of marvel, and marvel the mother of awe and praise. Or, as Jorge Luis Borges once said, "when we write about the fantastic, we are trying to get away from time and to write about everlasting things."

Burningham's latest book is Whaddayamean (Crown, $18.95), a parable about the urgent necessity of changing the way we live, think, and teach. The story is simple. Having taken millions of years to create this earthly paradise, God rests. Upon waking, God decides to visit the planet and see how things are going. Not wanting to be seen, God puts everyone in the world to sleep, and begins the tour. Startled to find two wakeful children, God invites them along on what proves to be the terrible discovery of our despoiled environment and hungry world. An enraged and sorrowful God charges the children with telling grown-ups to "change the way they are living." When they object that no one will heed them, God says, "They will listen, if you tell them that I told you to."

The children go forth, advocating change to financiers, clergymen, generals, and those who just stand by. These groups jeer ("Whaddayamean?"), until they are told that the message is from God. Hearing that, all change immediately. The world becomes lovely, and, on the closing page, the children are permitted by their mother to show God around again as long as they are not late for bed: "Remember you have school tomorrow."

Adults will resist the rapid change of heart, and blush at the wondrous pictures of financiers rhapsodically rowing down a river, clergymen line-dancing, and generals burying bombs. Unrealistic! It's much more complicated! And yet there is something in the baldness of God's command and the beauty of those pictures that shames our everyday evasions. We are too busy, too important, too powerless, too unsure, too ignorant; but we are not off the hook.

More to the heart of the matter is what young children resist in Whaddayamean. Used to volatility, they find the swift change unremarkable. What stops them is God's confession that he cannot recreate extinct creatures. All children think magically. It is up to us to cultivate the wonder in that thinking rather than the superstition. In earlier books, Burningham pits the fantastical against the literal and we laugh (see the uproarious John Patrick Norman McHennessy-The Boy Who Was Always Late for a particularly fine example). In Whaddayamean, he pits the fantastic (the gorgeous magic of evolution) against the merely escapist (our terrible inattention; our insufficient theology), and makes us gasp.

Burningham is just about the only picture-book creator who could make such a story startling rather than smarmy. This is partly owing to his art. He fearlessly varies media from page to page, using crayon, charcoal, india ink, gouache, pastel, photographs, and collage. His depicted world is under a marvelous and delicate ad hoc construction. And that variety of media knocks us off center, and makes us attentive to and grateful for variety. The tale is also fresh because of what I would call Burningham's "religious" imagination: his affirmation that all people have the capacity to change, his attention to the loveliness of this world, and his sure, almost casual, integration of science and faith.

That imagination also animates his extraordinary 1996 Cloudland, recently released in paper (Dragonfly, $7.99). Following the phenomenology of a near-death experience, Burningham tells the story of young Albert, who falls off a mountain and is caught with a magic spell by the children of Cloudland, with whom he frolics happily until his desire for mother and father moves the Queen to send him home. Burningham gives absolutely equal weight to the beauty of heaven and the beauty of life; Albert returns filled with the sweet desire both for home and for the spell that will return him to Cloudland.

What I especially love in all Burningham's books (those that touch on faith and many that do not) is that his young characters confront the fantastic with complete serenity. Be it with children in the clouds, a lion on the way to school, or God enroute to looking at the world, a Burningham child is open to all encounters. In this, Burningham outnesbits Nesbit, whose characters have residual sweats and anxieties about the magic they encounter.

Harrowing manifestations of the supernatural can be found in Rudolfo Anaya's My Land Sings: Stories from the Rio Grande (Morrow, $17, 174 pp., ages 10 and up). The celebrated Chicano writer (best known for his novel, Bless Me, Ultima) retells five folktales (cuentos) formed by the cultural confluences (Pueblo Indian, Spanish, and Mexican) of New Mexico's Rio Grande valley from the sixteenth century forward; to these he adds five modern cuentos of his own. Catholic elements are present in many of the stories: Mary succors peasants; Jesus is refused food by a woodcutter bitter about God's unfair treatment of the poor.

The majority are coming-of-age tales, and they emphasize the irrevocable results of young people's choices. While Anaya remains true to the folktales' conservative spirit, he is never misty-eyed about the life they aim to preserve. Anaya understands that, during the tumultuous time of an adolescent's awakened desire, the tellers wished to strongly reassert the values of emotional reticence, hospitality to strangers, and respect for parents. But Anaya also credits the young people's experience of village life as unjust and cruelly circumscribed.

Clearly, the stories of magic getting the most attention these days are British writer J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. The latest, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Scholastic, $19.95, 439 pp., ages 8 and up), finds the young wizard continuing his studies at Hogwarts, and fending off another terrifying assault from the allies of Lord Voldemort. Like the first two volumes in the planned series of seven, Azkaban is a pleasure: superbly constructed, amazingly inventive, deliciously hyperbolic, psychologically insightful, successful in both humor and terror. It also confirms that Rowling has a particular gift for the serial. With this new installment, she has us rethinking past events and guessing at coming twists.

While I had fun reading the Harry Potter books, I confess they unexpectedly depressed me. Despite their fantastical, technology-free trappings, the settings and plots perfectly mirror the new, rather unmagical, conditions of childhood. Acquisition (of stuff, spells, grades, house-points) plays as big a role as it does in life. Gone are the endless hours of unsupervised play found in Nesbit, Lewis, Burningham, and Eager, that leisure in which we oldsters imagined, invented, and stumbled on the marvelous. For Harry Potter, magic is not an accidental discovery or willed act of the imagination, but a structured program of study. When not assigned, books are read merely to solve problems.

Maybe I should credit Maurice Sendak for putting me in this mood. His latest storybook, Swine Lake (Harper Collins, $15.95, ages 4 and up), finds him as gloomy about the state of contemporary culture as he was in his extraordinary 1993 We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. In that earlier work, Sendak teamed up with Mother Goose to rail against contemporary homelessness and greed as crimes against the gorgeous souls of children. In Swine Lake, Sendak's illustrations (of a previously unpublished story by the late James Marshall) show the vulgarity of contemporary culture: our shuttered bookshops, landscape-blighting McMansions, bloated film and stage productions. It is against this backdrop that a mangy and lusciously romantic wolf keeps faith with beauty.

There have been many recent picture book "collaborations" between the living and dead (the resurgent interest in children's literature seems to have sent publishers to their dusty files). This one is the very best. Sendak adored James Marshall, and understood Marshall's immense gifts as quite different from his own. While his desire to pay homage is deep (the eyes are pure Marshall), it is never slavish. Knowing that he is Melville to Marshall's Moliere, our history-haunted chronicler of the inner life adds a new and unexpected dimension to Marshall's exuberant regard for human folly. This book reminds us that love is the most potent magic of all.

Other previously unpublished works that have found companionate illustrators are the late Margaret Wise Brown's Another Important Book (HarperCollins, illustrated by Chris Raschka, $15.95, ages 2-8) and the late Joseph Brodsky's Discovery (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky, $16, ages 4 and up). Raschka is in top form, geometricizing both childhood development and Brown's quirky rhythms. Brodsky's poem, about the "discovery" of America, cannily expands Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright" in every direction. His rhyme is, as ever, masterly (seagull/legal; silent/assignment), and his point of view absolutely fresh.

It is never the wrong season to revive Mother Goose. The Mother's legendary editor, Iona Opie, and illustrator Rosemary Wells team up again for a new selection of the rhymes. Here Comes Mother Goose (Candlewick, $21.99, 107 pp., ages 2 and up) is a great follow-up to their My Very First Mother Goose. Opie has taken a few comic liberties in her versions: perhaps boys are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. Wells, the master of deadpan illustration, introduces not only new animal characters, but some lovely fruit-headed royalty.

Although my focus has been on the magical, there are three works of gentle realism I commend to your attention. In a departure from his picture book work, Tomie de Paola, past recipient of the Catholic Library Association Regina Award, has just completed the first of a promised series of autobiographical storybooks. 26 Fairmount Avenue (Putnam, $13.99, 57 pp., ages 4 and up) finds five-year-old Tomie anxiously awaiting the completion of his home. Dick King-Smith (of Babe fame) has written a series of six books, beginning with Sophie's Snail (Candlewick, $4.99 paper, 95 pp., ages 4 to 9), which follows the exploits of a brusque young animal lover as she grows from age four to age eight.

Despite obvious differences in genre and locale, both series are dominated by a determined (and not-always-appealing) child, who is possessed with a strong sense of vocation that is lovingly nurtured by understanding older relatives. Little Tomie's exacting judgment of Walt Disney's Snow White is an especially fine vignette; and Sophie's great- great-Aunt Al is a character to watch out for. I am just sorry that both writers are so clumsy in their representation of childhood tears. Are there really children who have never felt the anxiety of separating from their parents; and who necessarily "disapprove" it in others? That judgmental stoicism might be what they call in the biz a "cover feeling." In any case parents who are trying to help their children (especially boys) feel comfortable about expressing feelings, will have to pass over a sentence or two in silence.

Then we may be so lucky as to nurture a child as emotionally capable as Ben Hunter, protagonist of Kevin Henkes's new novel, The Birthday Room (Morrow Junior, $15, 152 pp., ages 10 and up). This is a lovely and well-constructed story about an artistically talented boy who receives two things for his twelfth birthday: a room in which he can draw, and a letter from his mother's estranged brother. He surprises his mother by regarding the latter with far more excitement. Ben's burning desire to know the man responsible for the childhood accident that resulted in the loss of his finger precipitates painful conversation, lots of reconciliation, and even a little romance. It is heartening to see a family working so hard to make family work. Henkes once said that home was the oasis of his childhood; as he knows that this is not true for all children, his vocation is to share "this sense of hope."

Daria Donnelly's column on children's books appears twice a year. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.