Peach and Blue

First-time author Kilborne spins a heavily anthropomorphized tale of Blue, a boy toad, and the help he gives Peach. From high in her tree, she tells him: ``I wish I could see what the rest of the world is like.'' Though Blue thinks it's just ``all right,'' he plucks her from her branch and pushes her around in a twig toboggan. In a brief shift into rhyme, Peach exclaims over the ``beautiful colors'' she sees: ``the blue of your belly, of afternoon's sky,/ the brown of the bank, of the eider duck's eye.'' Both are happy, for she helps Blue see the world anew. Johnson and Fancher (The First Night) do their best with romantic, lushly colored illustrations; although the peach does get eyes, nose and mouth, the artists neither overemphasize nor deflate the tale's sentimentality. For fanciers of old-fashioned children's books only. Ages 3-7. (Oct.)