Children's picture books: On the hunt for subversive adventures

From Laura Hughes' We're Going on an Egg Hunt to Michael Foreman's Tufty: the Little Lost Duck who Found Love

Festive fun: illustration from Laura Hughes's ‘We’re Going on an Egg Hunt'

Laura Hughes' We're Going on an Egg Hunt (Bloomsbury, £6.99) pictures beaming Easter bunnies searching out brightly coloured eggs hidden under lift-up flaps. But what's behind this blue egg, twice the size of all the other talking animals so far encountered? A bushy tail not quite hidden provides a clue, but the wolf who jumps out when his flap is lifted can't quite catch the startled bunnies. They quickly repair home while he ends up with some of the eggs spilled along the way. Deservedly so, having provided valuable oomph to an otherwise deceptively placid little story.

Michelle Robinson's Elephant's Pyjamas (Harpercollins, £6.99) starts with a general email invitation sent on Zoogle to attend a sleep-over. While all the other animals have abundant and colourful nightwear, poor Elephant can find nothing that fits. Resigned to missing out, he is finally rescued by his friends who cobble all their spares together into a multi-coloured patchwork garment providing a perfect fit. Emily Fox's expressive illustrations show Elephant in deep despair on one page and bopping away as the picture of happiness on the next. Told in simple rhyming verse, this is good stuff.

Daisy Hirst's Alphonse, That Is Not OK To Do! (Walker, £11.99) is a delightfully original work, worth every penny. Picture books often feature sibling rivalry, but this one has the ring of close domestic truth. Natalie usually gets on well with her younger brother Alphonse, but not when he chews on her favourite book. Her revenge is to draw a savage picture of him where everything else goes terribly wrong. Guilt soon takes over after Alphonse turns unnaturally quiet – could the picture be turning out for real? But all is affectionately resolved in a story where the two main characters look like junior monsters but behave as humans.

Also refreshingly original, not to say subversive, is Will Mabbitt's This is NOT a Bedtime Story (Puffin, £6.99). Dad starts out by reading to daughter Sophie from an all-too-convincingly boring imaginary picture book where Pink Kitten hosts a birthday party. Sophie soon starts coming in with her own anarchic suggestions for upping the pace, allotting some of her bedroom toys increasingly heroic roles as she warms to her theme. Each version then struggles for ascendancy on the page, all hilariously pictured by Fred Blunt in cartoon mode. Dad certainly needs his quiet sit-down and a glass of wine by the end, but young audiences will probably want to watch him going through his story-telling ordeal again and again, each time picking out more comic detail.

Try to find room too for Fabi Santiago's Tiger in a Tutu (Orchard, £11.99). This Brazilian-born illustrator, now working in London, tells the story of a tiger coming out as a ballet dancer. Set in Paris, the saga of Max and his determination to get on the stage reads something like a fun version of Billy Elliot. Replete with ballet terms and packed with incidental detail, this engagingly romantic story also stars Celeste, a little ballerina offering valuable support when it is most needed.

Michael Foreman has been enriching children's imagination for years, and his latest picture book is well up to his super-high standards. Tufty: the Little Lost Duck who Found Love (Andersen, £11.99) has a needlessly sentimental title but this story has its tough side too. Living on a lake opposite what looks suspiciously like Buckingham Palace, Tufty admires those whom he calls the Duck and Duckess who walk by him in the day and party in the evening. Left behind after he fails to keep up with his family emigrating for winter, he finds himself lost in an alien city. But care is on hand from a homeless man who lives in a hollowed-out tree trunk opposite a smaller lake. Gentle colours and constantly shifting perspectives make this a book to treasure.