THE BEETLE BUSH

Poor Arabelle is already a failure--and beginning readers will feel with her when the picture she paints, the cake she bakes, everything she does is met with the question, ""What's that supposed to be?"" Even the garden Arabelle works so hard on is, in her father's words, ""nothing but weeds and snails and beetles and moles."" Suddenly however (a bit too suddenly but never mind), Arabelle determines, ""after all I have been through, I will not be a failure""--and when a visitor asks the inevitable question, she answers, ""That is my beetle bush. . . . My mole hole. . . . My snail trail. . . . My weed seeds."" The discovery of a large watermelon among the weeds simply caps the success that Arabelle has already made for herself. We miss the slanted reinforcement Diane Paterson gave Keller's Fiona's Bee (1975), but even Simont's conventional family can't keep Arabelle down.