BERTIL AND THE BATHROOM ELEPHANTS

This offbeat tale from a Swedish team dances between fantasy and reality, and should play quite differently for the grown-ups and children who read it. The opening page shows three-year-old Bertil in the tub, dumping water on a flooded bathroom floor. (Sharp-eyed readers will spot seaweed and a fish reflected in the mirror—the first hint of fantasy.) His mother, shown wringing out socks, "doesn't like a bathroom sea. As if that's Bertil's fault! As if everything in the whole world is Bertil's fault!" sympathizes the ingenuous narrator. Actually, Bertil explains, a pair of mischievous "bathroom elephants" are responsible for the mess, and later, the flushed-down underwear. Bertil's parents just laugh at these hijinks (a true sign of fantasy), but when Bertil becomes afraid of the pachyderms, his father futilely calls "Pest-Be-Gone." Finally a neighbor reports that the bathroom Bengalis have moved in with him. (Parents will notice the conspiratorial look in Dad's eye, while the ambiguity leaves children to their own interpretation.) Naïve watercolors intensify the story's childlike spirit. Although Lindström renders the elephants with a fetching semi-sophistication, she portrays the human characters with flat profiles and stunted appendages, and each scene displays the multiple perspectives found in an elementary school drawing. While the text meanders strangely at times, this book may beguile readers who are open to the quirky, nonlinear thinking (and illustration style) of childhood. Ages 2-6. (Sept.)