The work of Roslyn Schwartz, the Montreal-based creator of the Mole Sisters, has been praised for the way it incorporates large ideas into small vignettes for the preschool crowd. The first book in her new series, Tales from Parc la Fontaine, promises to maintain this aphoristic quality.

Each of this book’s three tales recounts a small creature’s adventures in a city park. First, Trevor the budgie escapes from his cage to go wild in the park, but after a scuffle with a couple of aggressive seagulls, he decides that freedom is overrated. Fiona the land snail, “on a quest for true, everlasting love,” finds a baby caterpillar who, she is reminded, is bound to fly away from her when he becomes a butterfly. Finally, Angela the fly sets out in the park knowing she has to make the most of her 24-hour lifespan, and she does.

The main theme is exploration, and, as in the Mole Sisters series, the tone is upbeat, with each character’s difficulty being dealt with by the end of the tale. If anyone is going to brood on the subtext of impermanence and the inextricability of desire and suffering, it’s more likely to be adults than the three- to six-year-olds for whom the book is recommended.

Children will readily notice its ornate, French aesthetic, and the small scale of the pictures, which are simply composed but detailed enough to invite inspection. Given the extreme simplicity of much of the text (some pages are captioned with a single word, such as “Whoosh”), the book seems best suited to children four and younger.