The organising principle behind Stephanie Owen Reeder’s Colour My World (NLA, $16.95 pb, 32 pp) is the power of colour to stimulate emotion and thought. Thirteen black-and-white portraits of children, spanning a hundred years of photography in Australia, have been drawn from the Pictures Collection at the National Library. Each has been paired with a colour, and a single element from the image tinted.

Owen Reeder’s accompanying text establishes an emotional tone for the colour, and complements the photograph. Her language has wonderful rhythm and is full of interesting word choices. Each page culminates in an open-ended question addressed to the imagined pre-school reader. ‘What stories do you like best?’ concludes the text alongside the Unidentified Student Reading at the Peninsular School, Mt Eliza, Victoria (1960/1961). ‘What do you do when the sun goes down?’ asks the Child Posing in Fancy Dress (1915). A crucial reading skill in emergent readers is making personal connections with the books they read, what literacy theorists call the text-participant function of literature. I read this book to my kindergarten class, and every question was a winner.It is a book that stimulates conversation and connection.

Nevertheless, a book that aims to celebrate colour can’t afford to skimp on production values. Colour My World feels too quickly designed and cheaply produced. It is ironic that the words ultimately work more generatively than the colour. Owen Reeder’s vision deserved better.

In comparison, When Henry Caught Imaginitis (Scholastic, $19.99 hb, 32 pp), by Nick Bland, is faultlessly designed and illustrated. In this delightful fable, colour is used creatively to patrol the border between the imaginative and factual domains. It is a better example of the ideas animating Colour My World.

The book opens with a blue butterfly floating discreetly above an impossibly neat and tedious-looking Henry. The butterfly becomes a motif for the silly thoughts bubbling away inside Henry’s head. It hides on each page and is a pleasure to find. No such fun for Henry, however. He consults ‘the Big Book of Sensible Things’, which suggests ‘don’t fly a rocket unless you’re an astronaut’. Henry, however, just can’t help himself and he heads off to the moon wearing a watermelon as a space helmet. Meanwhile, the butterfly is joined by a piratical parrot, a red dragon and an animal resembling a giant friendly blue dugong.

This is a book about the things that happen when you read a lot of books. It is an exciting premise, but once the drama has been established, the story shifts to allegory. What remains is a tale about a vestigial imagination circumscribed by childhood. It never fully asserts itself. The humour is impish, rather than anarchic, and Henry remains a very good boy at heart.

If When Henry Caught Imaginitis offers some of the satisfactions of challenging dinner-party conversation, Old Tom’s Big Book of Beauty (Allen & Unwin, $24.95 hb, 32 pp) offers the catharsis of a blinder of a night out. Leigh Hobbs’s depiction of the eponymous anti-hero is in the tradition of other modern primitives of the cartoon world. His owner feels that there might be ‘room for improvement’ and gives him the self-edifying‘Big Book of Beauty’. Old Tom is such an egoist that he mistakes critique for compliment and embarks on series of new looks, society balls and television engagements.

There is not much narrative arc to this instalment of Old Tom. The one-note joke of the book is that a cat constantly on the brink of decomposition is never going to be a social success. Nevertheless, children will choose and enjoy Old Tom’s Big Book of Beauty for the immediacy of its gratifications. In Old Tom himself they will recognise a kindred spirit: deep emotions bluntly expressed, strong fascinations constantly shape-shifting, violent and baroque fantasies tempered by a desperate longing for home.

I failed to find a kindred spirit in Miss Bilby (Crawford House Publishing, $24.95 hb, 32 pp), a posthumous work from Colin Thiele which does nothing to enhance his reputation. In expository bush verse, it tells a sentimentalised story of bilbies in Australia: the animals that eat them, the efforts of humans to protect them. My feeling is that if a child did have any interest in poetry then the po-faced metrical exercises recounting this story would soon sort them out. The stresses fall with wearying predictability: ‘At every turn Miss Bilby / Faced danger and defeat / With predators around her / And less and less to eat / A pitiful survivor / Of food and peace bereft / She and her companions / Were the only bilbies left.’ Mavis Stucci’s accompanying illustrations gesture towards the estranging quality of the naïve, but don’t quite master the form. Miss Bilby looks and feels like a picture book from times past.

The history of naïve art in children’s picture books could be a meaty essay topic. Frané Lessac’s artwork for Simpson and His Donkey (Walker Books, $27.95 hb, 40 pp, 9781921150180) is an example of how the genre can work powerfully. The flattening of perspective and the deliberate awkwardness in representation produce a kind of eye-witness effect. The viewer is caught by devilish bits of action in the page corners, little eddies and flows of pictorial drama: the sum impression is that war is not a controlled narrative event. I am not going to summarise the story of Simpson, but was generally impressed by the moving form that Mark Greenwood gave it here. It works best when the mythic frame is de-emphasised. Lines like ‘That was the first of many brave rescues’ sometimes distance us from the story, short-circuiting the drama of the narrative.

Finally, to Old Tucker Man (One Day Hill, $19.95 pp, 32 pp), by Kirrae Whurrong woman Debbie Austin. This book is an absolute delight. The text is direct and hypnotic. ‘Long, long ago, my uncle lived in the Framlingham bush in a bark hut with his family.’ Austin eschews pronouns, and the repetition of names and nouns adds solidity to the fictive world. There is an aura of inevitability to the drama as ‘Unc’ decides to kill a sheep (‘hit it with my waddy’) in order to feed his family.

Against the formally straightforward text, Austin’s hallucinogenic series of dot paintings, with their frames within frames within frames, destabilise the reader. Dots on the page meld with sheep on the landscape. I felt as if I was viewing a series of fiendish Isihara colour-blind tests. Hunting for ‘Unc’ on each page is better fun and more sophisticated than any Where’s Wally? book, but some of the pleasures found here are similiar.

From the three pages of framing material that precede the story, it is clear that Austin would like us to read Old Tucker Man as a tragedy. It is also impeccably comic, especially in its rhythms. I found myself laughing, and then catching myself laughing. It made me think about what it means to laugh, from what place and at whom. There is real knowledge in this book: the difficulty of contradictory world views, hard fought for, continually readjusting.

A good book like this shifts your perceptions and entertains. It hits you with its waddy. If Old Tucker Man were a wall, it would have a big wide top along it upon which children can run and dance and cry and whoop.