The Killick: a Newfoundland Story, by Geoff Butler, TundraRagged Bears #163;7.95. - 0 88776 336 7.

A Fish Tale, or The Little One That Got Away, by Leo Yerxa, Groundwood #163;8.95. - 0 88899 247 5.

Cat, You Better Come Home, by Garrison Keillor, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher Faber #163;9.99. - 0 571 17603 8.

My Friend Harry, by Kim Lewis. Walker #163;8.99. - 0 7445 3744 4.

Margaret Atwood not only minds her p’s, she perpetrates a pandemic of promiscuous alliteration in telling the tale of Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. Possessing herself of a plotline that’s partly Pinocchio, partly The Princess and the Pea but also, plainly, Post-Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, she relies as much on familiar narrative echoes as on the aforementioned alliteration.

The selfish princess is taught a lesson by “a white-haired, wrinkly-wristed Wise Woman”. Consideration for others, she learns, cures facial blemishes, in this instance a purple peanut sprouting on her nose. Stylistically, Atwood has a ball, as does Maryann Kovalski, who illustrates in the manner of Maurice Sendak imitation Rowlandson, with a touch of Fragonard for the fancier bits of parterre and gazebo. But for every nice phrase (“three pussycats . . . padding pompously away on their polished paws”) there are several yawning stretches of polished padding.

The moving and disturbing complexities of Geoff Butler’s The Killick: a Newfoundland Story are evident from the pictures he uses as prompts. They have the naive quality of good, uncontaminated, home-made recollections. A killick is an anchor made of wood and rock; it serves to anchor the story as it ventures from current circumstances (Newfoundland devastated by the end of the cod fisheries) through the recollections of First and Second World War veterans to the excitement, peril and tragedy of a trip by the boy George and his grandfather to an island abandoned in a previous recession. There are no concessions to easy sentiment and the sense of Newfoundland values is strong, with “broad spans of floating white ice” lurking offshore like great lumps of doom.

Native Canadian tradition, unassociated with European memories or preoccupations, is loosened up in the large pages of Leo Yerxa’s A Fish Tale, in which a little fish learns not to trust bigger fish and, in a big blue watercolour world, gets to realise that, ignorance aside (“I did not even know if God was a cod”), there is an ultimate fount of fishy knowledge. “God answered prayers no matter what kind of fish you were”. With that thought, the sploshy watercolour becomes a stain.

The promise that “this book will appeal to children, cat lovers and Garrison Keillor fans alike” is quite disturbing. Cat, You Better Come Home consists of a poem by Keillor that bears out Margaret Atwood’s assertion that “pussycats are perverse, piddling, pie-faced, pudding brains”, though with fewer adjectives and no alliteration, and with pictures by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher that translate the doings of the wayward cat into smarmy neo-synthetic Cubism. Artiness looms here, as the illustrations place this new Orlando in a context of marmalady Modernism. The cat leaves its home in the mid-west for a high life of Chateaubriand, caviar and celebrity status. Keillor fans will rejoice in the sly interpolations, the Owl and Pussycat references and the concept of “Le Cafe Triste”. Not to mention “ragout of robin thighs” and other delicacies,plus a nod to the underpinning of the House of Faber: T S Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats, here seen cast aside on her master’s sofa.

The cuddly elephant that bolsters a pre-schoolchild’s confidence sits comfortably in the Northumberland landscape of My Friend Harry by Kim Lewis. Mild-looking though the illustrations are, they convey growing awareness as a four-year-old gets used to the idea of seasons and circumstances changing and school impending. Hadrian’s Wall plays its part in the backdrop: a slice of history that goes unnoticed by the child James as he props his elephant upside down on the grass and tries standing on his head, all by himself.