A Necklace of Raindrops (5+) by Joan Aiken and Jan Pienkowski
Jonathan Cape, £12.99; 108pp Buy the book

A Filth of Starlings/A Drove of Bullocks (6+) by Patrick George
Patrick George, £9.99; 48pp Buy the book

In this season of low sunlight and sharp shadows, it’s appropriate that silhouette illustrations are suddenly all the rage. From Nick Sharratt’s expressive black shapes for Jacqueline Wilson’s Victorian novel, Hetty Feather, to numerous adult dust-jacket designs for authors ranging from Dave Eggers to Naomi Alderman, we have suddenly rediscovered something that Keats’s contemporaries knew well. A portrait in profile can tell us so much about character, situation and expression that more is superfluous.

Jan Pienkowski is not the first children’s book illustrator to exploit this; Arthur Rackham and Walter Crane, among others, revelled in the delicate detail a silhouette allows, and shadow-puppets are themselves an ancient form of storytelling in many cultures. However, the collection of original fairytales that Pienkowski created with the late Joan Aiken in A Necklace of Raindrops is something that should be on every child’s shelf. The stories achieve a perfection of construction, language and content that is extremely rare and, although the words stand on their own merits, the pictures are what make this a great book. From the endpapers, in which a turbaned gentleman and his cat swoop across a purple sky sprinkled with stars, over a turreted castle where a dragon is landing, a ship sailing and a train departing, to the full-page colour illustrations featuring flaming tigers, chicken-legged huts and giant marmalade cats, this is about the very essence of magic.

Pienkowski is famous for many kinds of children’s books, from the simple, comical Meg and Mog, about a witch and her cat, to pop-ups such as Haunted House and Little Monsters. Spooky, funny, inventive though these are, it’s his silhouette books that are his lasting contribution to childhood.

Far too many picture books still appear to have no real sense of design, proportion, colour or delight. Not Pienkowski’s: his witches are truly ugly, down to the last wart, and his princesses are limber, with elegance in every curl of their long hair — caught in childish grace or womanly flowering. Here is the North Wind ready to give his saviour’s daughter the magic necklace that will give her the blessing of rain in a dry land; a pie so light that it can float through the sky; and many other marvels. That said, Aiken’s and Pienkowski’s other book of this kind, The Kingdom Under the Sea, is even more splendid (especially with the irresistibly gruesome cover of a prince cutting off his hand, spraying black blood to feed to ravening wolves below him) and as deserving of a reissue.

A Filth of Starlings and A Drove of Bullocks are compilations of animal group names, brilliantly exploited by Patrick George. If you think that these are too sophisticated for a child of 6+, think again. From a parliament of owls, whose eyes are made up of two Big Ben clock faces, to a pod of dolphins (listening to iPods), a school of whales (a schoolmasterly face with a whale’s tail forming moustache and tie), these are stylish, witty visual puns. They are books to read and explain, but the elegance with which each picture is drawn would work on T-shirts or calendars.

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