DRAWN FROM NEW ENGLAND

Tasha Tudor, we learn with some wonder, has managed to live the rustic, old-fashioned life depicted in her books; and the nice thing about daughter Bethany's admiring portrayal of that life is its suggestibility—the satisfactions of molding butter or weaving baskets; the procession of holidays imaginatively observed (with candlelit birthday cakes actuary floating down the river—as in Becky's Birthday—and miniature valentines for the costume dolls); the sense of the least repast as an Occasion. The negative aspect of this storybook world is its unreality. Tasha Tudor's yachtsman father and artist mother were divorced when she was nine; that event, we hear, freed her to live an unconstricted, creative life with a family friend in the country. Tasha's husband, Bethany's father, is referred to as a natural suburbanite who didn't share his wife's passion for farming; and after hardly figuring in the family doings on their restored Vermont farm, he disappears without explanation. And did the four children—two boys and two girls—all share Bethany's pleasure in dressing up and posing in antique clothes? About Tudor's work as a creator of children's books we learn only that she always wanted to be an illustrator, not an artist; that she wrote in order to have something to illustrate; that she had trouble placing her first book, Pumpkin Moonshine. But the book—in an oblong, picture-book format—is packed with family photos and examples of Tudor's handiwork; and children may well take it—not too seriously—as itself a kind of historic restoration.