Working with about 300 words, award-winning novelist Sarah Ellis has written Next Stop, her first picture book. Its text is the height of simplicity, in both structure and vocabulary, and opens with: “On Saturday, Claire rides the bus.” At first, young Claire seems like one of those enthusiastic but vaguely irritating kids who sits right up front, helping the bus driver: after he announces a street name, Claire chimes in with the relevant landmark.

“Next stop, Moss Road,” says the driver.

“Museum,” says Claire.

“Ding,” says the bell.

This text pattern is repeated throughout, forming the spine of the story. Ellis knows that street names are abstractions to kids: they navigate by landmarks – libraries and shopping malls and parks. Ellis also makes sure that her descriptions are very much those of a child, right down to the vocabulary and details: “Three big kids get on,” and “A boy with rainbow shoes gets off,” and, my favourite turn of phrase, as it captures the importance of things for kids: “A dog with a man gets on.”

As the bus trundles along, Ellis drops a subtle clue that explains (to concerned adults anyway) why Claire is alone and why the bus driver has not hitherto told her to pipe down and move to the back. While the ending may not entirely be a surprise, it is sweet and thoroughly satisfying, and leaves the reader with the cozy sense of a family homecoming.

Some illustrators may have felt downcast at the prospect of illustrating a book that takes place entirely on a bus, but Ruth Ohi, who excels at small domestic details, combats the visual limitations of the setting by cutting back and forth between the inside and outside of the bus, and putting plenty of people and activity in every double-page spread. Sometimes she creates mini- dramas: a woman’s dumped groceries on the bus floor, a lost toy being returned by Claire, a crying toddler who has dropped her ice cream.

The simplicity of the vocabulary is an asset for children just beginning to read; those children who are listening to the book being read aloud may find the story a bit unvaried, as the central refrain repeats without gaining any narrative momentum until the very end. But thanks to Ohi and her cheerful and colourful drawings, there is always plenty to look at during the trip – including, if I’m not mistaken, Sarah Ellis herself on the bus, in the green sweater, smiling enigmatically and reading a book.

The prospect of trying to produce some incisive statement about the unity and meaning of Dennis Lee’s latest collection of poetry fills me with an undergraduate dread. Give me a D- but I don’t think Bubblegum Delicious is about anything in particular, except being a kid. Lee writes about things that are part of every child’s life: the wind, donuts, rocking chairs, playing, the feeling of missing somebody. Obviously, Lee knows exactly what he’s doing: most of the poems are like perfect, exploding pieces of popcorn, his rhyme schemes simple and fast, his rhythm flawless (a surprising rarity in children’s poetry): “Fly me round the microwave./Fly me round the moon./Fly me like a millionaire/On a Saturday afternoon!” Lee understands that children like high-octane fun and games, but he doesn’t underestimate them either. He knows they have intense feelings, and he writes movingly about such things as loss and loneliness, too. (“And if a flock of memories/Could make a person sing,/I’d be an all-night radio/And play like anything.”) Then again, he can also make fun of the same conventions with a poem like “The Faithful Donut,” which opens with “Far across the ocean,/Far across the sea,/A faithful jelly donut/Is waiting just for me.”

David McPhail’s illustrations do an admirable job grounding the absurdity and occasional surrealism of Lee’s verse. Each poem is illustrated, and McPhail has created a little boy as the virtual hero of the collection, a cherub with a mop of blonde hair and a little puppy as a sidekick. His images create a decidedly nostalgic feel to the book, harkening back to the romanticized illustrations I imbibed as a child in the late 1960s and early ’70s: perfect children in dreamy, idyllic landscapes. Interestingly, embedded in many of these illustrations (sometimes slyly twining through them) is a secondary set of pithy four-line poems, many of them about bugs. Some of these will certainly appeal to children’s Rabelaisian sensibilities: “Bugs and beetles, don’t be late,/Set your feelers nice and straight:/Puke the slimy crud you chewed,/And smear it through the humans’ food.”

McPhail, understandably, has followed Lee’s lead, and so he too has populated his nostalgic, idealized landscape with a host of anthropomorphized bugs, some small and some frighteningly big and gangly. At first I worried that we were veering into the pictorial territory of illustrator Victor Gad (whose scarifying pictures never fail to scare the bejesus out of me) but then I quickly remembered that children have absolutely no natural aversion to bugs – it’s a learned response – and, on the contrary, find them fascinating. And of course, pros like McPhail and Lee knew this all along.