Oranges

``A world of work / is in this ripe orange that I pry apart,'' says the girl who narrates this bright, informative book by newcomer Rogow. The brief text traces the path of an orange from the fields which ``somebody cleared'' to the mouth of the young girl who tastes ``its / liquid fibers dissolved on her tongue.'' Szilagyi's competent colored pencil and watercolors focus like the text on the people who plant, harvest, sort, load, and sell the boxes of oranges. The text sometimes hovers confusingly between the general and the particular: ``Some trucker drove the oranges . . . Probably he spoke English . . . Some grocery clerk bagged this one . . . Probably he spoke Korean.'' A substitution of ``perhaps'' for ``probably'' would have made the multicultural dimension of the ``world of work'' more clear to literal-minded young readers. A Richard Jackson Book. Ages 4-6. (September)