SPROUT'S WINDOW CLEANER

These two British imports about a very young boy never approach the depth that Maria Gripe touches in her Elvis books (p. 469, J-153), for example, but Wayne does give us a charming likeness of a child's viewpoint and sense of priorities. The stories are slight: in the first, four-year-old Sprout, who has a collection of toy elephants, takes a notion to ride a real one and, on his (runa)way to the zoo, buys a huge red one, not real but big enough to ride, for 30¢ in a junk shop. In Sprout's Window Cleaner, Sprout, now in school, is totally preoccupied with winning the class flowerpot-gardening prize. Both plots seem better scaled to chapters than whole books (even 90-page books), but Sprout is so busy with his elephants and so involved with rescuing his potted onion from countless mishaps (while fetching a pot for it he even helps catch a burglar, but that's of secondary importance to him) that the stories don't wear thin. The usual problem remains: would the eight-year-olds who can read this identify with one so young? But Sprout could do well by a home or kindergarten read-aloud.