Here's the easy gift list of the weekend. Katie Daniels reviews three new children's books in the Journal's Fall Books section. Each costs under $20. Each has the age range printed. And all three together come to less than sixty dollars. One has ghosts, one has a sheep with a plan, and one has Roman statues hitchhiking home.
The Lost Three by Annie Barrows (336 pages, $17.99) opens with a clerical mix-up at the Ghost Guild. Three siblings, Genevieve, 14, Fenella, 11, and their little brother Tillotson, come back as ghosts while their own funeral is still going on. Nobody gave them the handbook. So they learn by trial and error. Genevieve finds she can dress up as a glamorous 17-year-old. Fenella covers herself in gray fur and passes for a cat. The reviewer says the premise sounds gloomy and the book isn't. Chloe Bristol's black-and-white drawings help. “People keep scaring us,” Fenella admits. Ages 8 to 12, and the ending leaves room for a sequel.
Tom Nancy: The Sheep Who Swapped Brains With a Boy is by Mac Barnett, with pictures by X. Fang (48 pages, $19.99). Its star is a sheep with shifty eyes and a mean grin. He talks a farm boy named Felix into swapping brains for a day. There's a brain-swapping machine in the old barn, naturally. Tom Nancy likes sandwiches, tree climbing and dessert, and he'd rather not switch back. Then come homework and chores. The reviewer says Barnett, who has retold The Three Billy Goats Gruff and Rumpelstiltskin, knows the old rule. Villains get what's coming. Ages 4 to 8.
The Returnus is by Joaquín Camp (36 pages, $18.99), translated from the Spanish by Ines Silva. A band of Roman statues escapes a foreign museum and hitches a ride back to Italy. They talk in made-up Latin. The narrator says standing still for visitors gets boringum. They say goodbye to their friends in the Egyptian wing, raid the lost-and-found for disguises and arrive to find Rome full of selfie sticks. Their old leader, a statue of Julius Caesar, now goes by JC and wears his cap backward. Ages 3 to 7. In the end a lucky old lady gets some unusually fine lawn ornaments.
Our read
This is Cash Flow (M5), the gifts line. Three books, three age ranges, and a total under sixty dollars. That's the whole planning point, and it's a small one. Gifts are the budget line that gets away from grandparents, because each one is small and there are a lot of grandchildren and a lot of occasions. A list like this one keeps the number honest. Books are also the gift that doesn't need batteries, a charger or a trip back to the store.
If you give to grandchildren every year, put a number on it in January and spend it on purpose. A book under $20 a child is a fine place to start. And if the giving is bigger than books, a plan review is where to check that it fits the rest of the picture. The umbrella goes in the bag before the picnic, not after the first drop.