Children’s books that are also works of art have been the territory of Tundra Books since its beginning. Canny pairings of writers and illustrators, the creative press-ganging of artists from the mainstream world of gallery art, and an emphasis on book design have resulted in books that, over the decades, have gained international recognition and, more importantly, show respect for child readers by saying, “you deserve a beautifully crafted thing.”

One of Tundra’s happiest constellations of talent is the trio of writer Roch Carrier, illustrator Sheldon Cohen, and translator Sheila Fischman. They brought us The Hockey Sweater and its three sequels. In 1996, when the final book in that series showed the young hero on the brink of adulthood, I thought the collaboration was over. Happy news: they’re back.

The story of the flying canoe (chasse-galerie) is one of French Canada’s best-known folktales. In this version we begin in Carrier’s familiar world of the 1940s. A group of children sit at the feet of a storytelling grandmother who, with the magical incantation “crick, crack, crock,” transports them back a hundred years to New Year’s eve in 1847 at a logging camp in the Ottawa Valley. The loggers are homesick, and toward midnight they summon the magic canoe and set sail in the night sky. Included in the crew is 11-year-old Baptiste, our window on this story.

The loggers don’t quite make it home, however, as they stop off in Quebec City for a drink and some female companionship. Abandoned with the canoe, cold, lonely, and with newly acquired navigation skills, Baptiste takes to the air alone. He makes his way home but then finds himself in the classic sorcerer’s apprentice dilemma: he doesn’t know how to stop the canoe. He finally jumps ship and lands in a heap on the verandah of his family home.

Carrier’s reworking of the folktale is original and particularly suited to our century for several reasons. Some versions emphasize the evil that lies behind the magic. The ever-benign Carrier softens this devilish element while remaining true to his sources. The men wonder, “How can a canoe fly through the sky like a great wingless bird? There were some who said it was the Devil’s magic. Others, that it was a miracle wrought by God.” With his framing story Carrier also places the narrative firmly in the context of family history. The narrator is one of the listeners of the tale. The story, from his point of view, is a tale of his grandmother’s grandfather.

This generational link goes even farther, however, in both directions. When the chasse-galerie flies over, Montreal revellers look up and wonder if their grandparents’ legends were true. And that little boy listening to the story and passing it on to us? He would be roughly the age of a grandfather today. Therefore, this could be a story of a contemporary child’s grandparents, bringing us pretty much back to the roots of Canada as we know it.

Carrier and Fischman fashion words that beg to be read aloud. “The air scraped the men’s cheeks. The wind combed the fur of their coats and hats. The frost clung to their beards, and their breathing turned it to ice. In rhythm, they paddled with all the strength in their muscular arms. The canoe charged into the night.” Cohen’s pictures reward the kind of repeated, concentrated looking that children do. He creates a world, highlighted with lurid purple and orange, that’s just on the verge of spinning out of control. He keeps the viewer on the move, paddling us up and down, in and out, our vertiginous journey paralleling that of Baptiste’s. It is a fine ride.

Simply Read Books was unknown to me until I encountered their stunning edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Iassen Ghiuselev. Their idealistic efforts (like Tundra’s) to blend extraordinary artwork, outstanding graphic design, and quality production are heartening, and awards from the Alcuin Society attest to their success in achieving these goals.

With their latest offering, however, they’ve missed the boat. One Little Bug by Paola van Turennout begins in a promising vein. A plain sky-blue double spread contains a bottom strip of delicious lime green and one blobby minimalist bug. The thick black outline, flat colours, and static composition are in the tradition of Dick Bruna. The text, encased in a box, says plainly and pleasingly, “One little bug/Can be very small./He’s not much to look at,/And not very tall.” The next double-page spread adds one more blobby bug, and we’re happily in the world of a counting book. Bugs appear and disappear and the numbers change. More than this, the bugs stand on top of each other pyramid-style, and when the configuration changes, so does the balance, providing a basic lesson in physics similar to the one children get when playing with blocks. Counting, balancing, and bugs are all great elements for a book for very young children.

By the time we have seven bugs, however, things start to go off the rails. The rhyming couplets – a challenging verse style in the most accomplished of poetic hands – start to become contrived and sing-songy, the rhymes imprecise. “Then to make seven,/Just add two more fellas./Now that it’s raining/Let’s add an umbrella.” And the bugs are so stylized they become hard to identify, looking confusingly like spiders.

By the time the ants bail out (“The ant meets his friends/At the sandbox next door, Where they build castles/Whenever they’re bored”), my fingers are itching for a blue pencil. A book this simple needs to be very tight, consistent, and crisp. The pictures nearly get there, but the words fall short of the mark. On the flap copy van Turennout writes that her goal was to make bugs “as irresistibly cute as possible.” This might be the problem. The Berenstain Bears are cute, but van Turennout’s potential lies well beyond this.