We all know this child. At age two she cheerfully tucked into parsnips, olives, and jellied tongue. At age six she will eat only macaroni. A similar swing to the conservative often happens in children’s reading. The four-year-old with a rich literary diet of fairy tales, realism, fantasy, poetry, and nonsense becomes the seven-year-old emerging reader who wants one kind of book, and one kind only. My theory about this swing is that reading is so tough when you’re new at it that you have no spare energy for ambiguity, complexity, or novelty. You want a book exactly like the one you had before, except with a different story. For this brief period in a reader’s life, a series is just what’s called for.

With Princess and Second Banana, Ted Staunton adds volumes four and five to his Kids from Monkey Mountain series. This series involves a group of middle-graders who live in the small town of Hope Springs, Ontario, and attend O.P. Doberman Public School. Staunton’s raw material – friendship dilemmas, giggling in church, encounters with skunks and bullies, talent shows, and inkwell holes in the desks – could be right out of Robert McCloskey’s 1950s classic Centerburg Tales. It is funny, gentle, good-hearted, and genuine. Staunton is a sharp-eyed observer of child relationships.

In Second Banana Ryan is trying to figure out how to be and have a friend. Partnering with bad boy Travis, even though it gives Ryan that “in on something” buzz, hasn’t quite worked out. So, as an alternative strategy, he decides to audition for the lead in a community production of Oliver. He inadvertently reveals his ambition to his sort-of-friend Nick. Then he worries. “What if Nick tells everyone about him being Oliver? And what if Travis finds out? Oh, man. He can hear the HEE-YUK-YUK-YUK already. Maybe he should ask Nick not to mention it. But what if Nick wasn’t going to? Then he’d sound so dumb Nick probably would mention it. Ryan wishes he could just stay home.” Poor Ryan would be right at home in a monologue by Stuart McLean.

In the Monkey Mountain series, Staunton invents a terrific solution to the hunger of this age group for the same book over and over. Each volume focusses on a different character but uses much of the same plot material. Thus in Second Banana, Ryan’s story, we see how Ryan is humiliated when Travis demonstrates a trick with an exploding pop can. But if we have read Monkey Mountain 3, Travis’s story (Forgive Us Our Travises), we know that the whole thing is Travis’s courtship ritual, designed to impress Mary Beth. Then if we go on to read Princess, Mary Beth’s story, we get the inside scoop on how Mary Beth is not impressed by Travis’s attentions (which might be because they mainly involve burping and farting). Individually the books have the comforting, stable authorial voice of the limited third-person point of view. Taken as a whole, however, they have the richness of a multiple narrator, giving kids a taste for the more complicated narratives to come in their lives, in books and elsewhere.

Part of the appeal of a series certainly lies in packaging. It has taken a while for the Monkey Mountain series to get it right. The illustrations to the first three books were fairly lame. Susan Gardos’s black-and-white drawings for the recent volumes are much better. They have the look of movie stills – photographic realism combined with theatrical composition, contributing to the feeling of familiarity and ease.

In Naomi and Mrs. Lumbago by Gilles Tibo, illustrator Louise-Andrée Laliberté takes a slightly less naturalistic approach to decorating the early reading chapter book. There is a pared-down quality to her pencil drawings that captures the more impressionistic and focussed nature of this story. Seven-year-old Naomi has very busy parents. She is cared for by Mrs. Lumbago who lives upstairs in their apartment building. Mr. Lumbago is a shadowy character in a rocking chair. Action and emotion walk parallel lines in this story. The action involves an overheard remark that leads Naomi to believe that there is a treasure hidden in the Lumbagos’ apartment. She cleans the place top to bottom in her search and imagines herself in a pirate adventure that ends with the discovery of a treasure chest of jewels. The emotional trajectory of the story centres on the death of Mr. Lumbago and the trauma for Mrs. Lumbago that turns into a kind of liberation. The two stories come together in the eventual discovery of the treasure. Here sentimentality looms but Gilles Tibo veers off in the nick of time. I thought I knew what the treasure was, but I was wrong. In the original French, Naomi is featured in a number of adventures by Tibo. Now that we’ve met Naomi, further appearances in English are most welcome. With her corkscrew curls and her existential worries about being a speck in the universe, she’s not quite safe macaroni but she makes taking a slight risk worth it.