This collection of 12 critical essays--written for teachers, librarians, students, and parents--comments on the style, characterization, sense of wonder, and sense of reality in children's books. Specific subjects covered are (1) the fantasy worlds of Andersen, Beatrix Potter, Walter de la Mare, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien; (2) the craft of writing--sound in poetry, the sense of location and time in fiction, and the audience; (3) the heightening, through books, of the child's sense of the marvelous, and (4) the relationship of the author's life to his work, especially in the works of Wanda Gag and Eleanor Farjeon. (LH)