The Big Alfie and Annie Rose Storybook

Hughes offers readers her usual clear-eyed view of childhood in this 64-page collection of stories. It's a leisurely visit with siblings Alfie and baby Annie Rose; he teaches her to feed herself, and she rewards him cruelly: the very first name she learns to say is that of his friend Bernard. The children know all the people up and down their street, and theirs is a friendly world--when a neighbor, Mrs. McNally, gives Alfie a hat, he in turn offers it to the milkman on a rainy day. Light, unrhymed poems punctuate the stories about this school-age boy and his toddler sister. Fans of the other Alfie books and those meeting the family for the first time will be pleased by the real-life situations, jauntily depicted in Hughes's fresh-faced watercolors. Ages 3-6. (Mar.)