JANE, WISHING

Jane, plain Jane (who looks variously ten to fourteen) wishes herself into a romantic realm where her name would be Amanda or Melissa, her eyes would be sea-green sea-blue, her skin would be see-through pale, she would be an only child, with a room of her own, etc., etc.--only to be put down, on the interleaved black-and-white pages, by the obtuse-to-obnoxious members of her notably unsympathetic family. So she decides--on the final page--""to be happy anyway."" Jane's wishes are years ahead of most picturebook youngsters, even assuming that they're today's wishes to the extent that the cloddy family--smiling for the first time in the finale--is today's waking bad dream. What she has to be happy about is hard to perceive.