To begin with the least sophisticated, in terms of its possible readership, Tough Lester (Omnibus Books, $19.95 hb) presents us with the ram­shackle football team (rugby for all you sports fans) of which Lester is the mainstay. Whilst the other children, of every size, shape, colour and sex, all have their techniques to feel fierce before a match (Emmanuelle Mengler makes crabby claws and vampire teeth) Lester Orphington doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t have to.

All this bravado is put to the test when the team meets The Bombers. They arrive in a mean looking bus, all black and red, bristling with balloons and a big red ‘Beware’ sign taped to the front, which totally dominates the page, while our team huddle over by the right hand edge looking very small indeed – even Lester.

This compositional skill is one of the highlights of Smith’s work and it adds dimension and freshness to every page turning. Another is the breadth of expression he is able to conjure from a minimum of facial detail. Certainly the exaggeration of body posture and point of view are put to their most effective use – the coach is almost bent double in order to be on head level with the team members, and the mash of the scrum is a raucous mêlée of arms, legs and popping eyes. In addition, Smith is probably one of the few artists who can pair up such combinations as tomato sauce red with lime cordial green, or woolly maroon with lollipop yellows and still make it look brassy, ebullient and appealing.

Teachers who found Hilton’s A Proper Little Lady such a boon in the classroom with its portrait of a girl who liked dressing up yet was revealed to be a ‘tomboy’ will find a matching pair here in Lester, who, tough as he looks, is definitely in touch with his feminine side.

You’ve heard of the road movie? Well Highway (Omnibus Books, $19.95 hb) is the road picture book. Rather than being simply a means for getting from one place to another, the highway is the journey as Wheatley, as always, reinterprets the landscape. The narrator, a girl of about nine, her mum, dad and little brother, all pile into her dad’s semi­trailer which is loaded with tyres for a surprise holiday. McLean’s illustrations are so gentle, waterclours are so easy on the eye, his creation of characters so skilled as to be unobtrusive, that it may take two or three readings to grasp the complexity of what has been accomplished. Although the journey technically consists of a long drive down the highway, the delivery of goods and the return trip at night with another load, through the eyes of a nine year old girl, the trip is full of learning, every hill, valley and expanse of road works or logging holds its own fascinating story.

McLean presents the reader with a multi-faceted approach. Each double spread page is taken up mostly by a rendition of the activity on that stretch, whether it be a stop at the swimming hole near the willows or the long wait at the road works. Then is added a smaller view of travelling life inside the cabin of the truck. Along the top border are vignettes from the journey -road signs; a rocket shaped letterbox; the headstone found in the cemetery during a pee stop -and a segment of the cognitive maps to be found on the endpapers and which are a vital component of the narrative.

The mundanity of long road trips is left behind -the parents here share their delight and interest in every part of the journey, adding another level of experience to every sight. The girl notes that the refinery chimney is brighter at night and looks like a giant’s candle – her mother says it reminds her of a tiger burning bright -and a tiger duly appears on the map.

Crew has a wonderful facility for daring to venture where the picture book has not been before, and for finding new and exciting illustrators to document the journey. In this one it is the history of the human race no less! Crew also has a tendency to find bleakness and despair whichever way he looks and to pair this with a flair for horror that makes one feel he was reared on Hammer films. I felt with his recent book Tagged, that a progression toward meaning rather than superficiality was evident, but here we are back to purple prose, dramatic effects and sudden plot twists – all superbly done on the technical level no doubt. But to what end?

In this mysterious story, heavy with intense dread, Tari has worked in moody purples and dark broody reds which swirl right to the edge of the page and cover the cosmos in angry clouds. One has to peer quite closely to catch the detail of the nine small squares on each verso page which are placed within the circle of the viewmaster. Tristan, another in the line of sensitive, gifted young male outsiders who inhabit Crew’s books, finds the viewmaster in a (Pandora’s) box at the tip. Properly, the whole book must be turned in order to view the encapsulations of moments from history which are revealed.

It would be most enlightening to pair this book with Riddle’s The Tip at the End of the Street. Where Riddle found an old man who introduced the children to the wisdom and pleasures of the past and thereby reconnected them to the present, Crew and Tan find, starvation, gassing, religious wars, slavery etc. It would be easy, given the technical mastery of the whole book to be drawn in and consumed, (as perhaps Tristan is?) by this particularly foreboding view of humanity which focuses on the worst aspects of war, colonialism and scientific holocaust. For teenage readers there are hours of intriguing reading in the minutiae of detail, pictographs and historic symbolism which would be compelling if you concur with the underlying nihilism. I however do not – although I have no problem with it being raised as a possibility, to offer no alternative, to leave the adolescent reader powerless and horrified to write ‘dead end’ at the sudden bend in the road is a cop out.