Feelings

Unmistakably: I'll Be You and You Be Me in color--and, alas, flatter, less inspired. But in these pages of pictured dialogues, episodes, and whatever--including just plain pictures and picture-strips--there are multitudinous illustrations of feelings that youngsters will recognize and presumably respond to. ""WE HAVE A NEW GIRL IN CLASS,"" for instance, gives us a solitary tot and a descending column of miserable thoughts--""I'd like to hide. They're all staring at me. . . . I wish I could fall through a crack in the floor""--and alongside the onlooking children's heads below, their words and thoughts: ""She looks shy""; ""You'd feel shy, too, if you were standing up there."" ""She looks nice."" Then, in a side-drawing (the kind Krauss/Sendak used for asides), there's a smidgen of plot: the little girl who thought ""She looks nice,"" speaks to the newcomer: ""Hello. My name is Patricia."" Aliki is a conceptualizer and storyteller, where Krauss was a poet/dramatist, and the difference is evident throughout the book. There's a pastoral landscape, looking rather like John Burningham, labeled ""feeling quiet""; there's a girl in a room crowded with toys, who pronounces herself ""BORED."" (Says one little birdie to another: ""She sounds lonely to me."") There's a child's version of a New Yorker cartoon--a youngster peers from backstage into a huge, dark auditorium: ""You're next, Joanna. Don't be nervous."" There's a page on which a little boy mimes different feelings (angry, sad, proud) for a little girl to guess--something that Margaret Wise Brown once thought of having Thurber do. There's at least one story, the six-part ""Birthday,"" that rings amusing, explicit changes on feelings (and has as much substance as many a whole book). Perhaps children accustomed to thinking and talking about feelings will take this all as a matter of course--an outcome both desirable and regrettable. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.