Circus Girl

This vivid mood piece economically conveys the exotic quality of its eponymous heroine's way of life: ``Alice is a circus girl. Everyone in her family is in the circus. Alice's mother walks the tightrope, and her father is a clown.'' Alice's family starts and ends the day with a caravan trip to a new town, and Garland ( My Cousin Katie ) chronicles their routines, from the circus parade and the backstage doings to the show itself. The text is understated, with the drama reserved for Garland's essentially realistic paintings of parading elephants, leaping acrobats, motorcycle-riding bears and so forth. Both the palette and the lighting are somewhat theatrical--for example, there's quite a lot of royal blue and Bozo-the-clown orange-red--and many subjects seem frozen in the glare of a spotlight. The combination of the matter-of-fact narrative and the lustrous art produces pleasing contrasts: ``Her father reads Alice a bedtime story before she goes to sleep,'' reads the conclusion; the facing illustration shows the father, in clown suit, makeup and wig, sitting cross-legged with a very tired Alice in his lap as he reads from an open book--with the circus lions and tigers, a few feet away in their cages, looking amazedly on. Ages 4-8. (May)