FOUR LITTLE TROUBLES

With indifferently reproduced three color drawings and soft paper covers, this boxed package of four puny variations on a minimal theme is better suited to toting to the sandbox than returning to the library. In Eugene a turtle just starting school finds that the "real meanie" of a teacher he's been warned against is really the kind lady he saved from a bug just that morning; in Sing Out Irene a bulldog finds that being cast as a toadstool in the spring pageant is special after all, for all the other children are flowers who can't be told apart; in Snake the title character uses his ability to hear, which had made him unhappily different from his peers, to foil a bank robbery; and in Someone Is Talking About Hortense a white raccoon, upset about her friends' secretive behavior, finds out most predictably of all that they've been planning her birthday party. But it takes more than furnishing all the dumpy looking animals with clothes and cozy homes to make these very little fabrications worth the trouble.