Is your child's pretend play routine becoming a little pedestrian? Introduce some fascinating mythical creatures into their repertoire with these wonderful (and sometimes chilling) books.


The Hidden Folk: Selkies are women who live in seal skins and come ashore to play on the beach; if one's skin is captured, she is bound to the one who took it until she can recover it. Elves come in light (good) and dark (evil) varieties; you can tell dark elves from light ones because their "backs are as hollow as bread troughs." A water horse or kelpie takes the form of a horse (albeit one with several giveaway features) but drags unsuspecting riders into the water to drown and eat them. Enter the world of flower fairies, gnomes, dwarves, river sprites, and more with this captivating book by Lise Lunge-Larson. Traditional (but often enhanced) stories are prefaced by individual pages describing the type of creature in a naturalistic voice and setting up the story to follow. Highly recommended, and coincidentally the book you might wish to be most careful with - it contains some truly spooky stuff. Our four-year-old Z adores it. | $14 on Amazon.com

Favorite Tales of Monsters and Trolls: This classic three-story paperback from Random House is out of print, but was widely circulated - check your local used bookstore, local library, or buy it used on Amazon.com. The illustrations in this book are fascinating, with grotesquely beautiful illustrations teeming with little folk who bear no relation to the stories (The Three Billy Goats Gruff among them) but fill the background and react to the actions of the characters (fleeing a tree being chopped down, for example). | Price varies


Trouble with Trolls: We went on a Jan Brett kick this holiday season, thanks to her wonderful Christmas Treasury. This story, contained in the larger volume, is also available on its own, and is winter- but not Christmas-specific. Brett enjoys taking "hidden folk" - trolls specifically - and endowing them with a specific set of cultural mores and personality traits. Brett's trolls are grasping and needy, childlike but still slightly menacing, yet outsmarted by a resourceful and self-confident young girl. Benign and accessible, with the kid coming out on top by using her wits. | $7 on Amazon.com


The Tomten and the Fox: It was Brett who got us interested in tomte(n) - gnomelike creatures who protect farmyard animals from nocturnal predators - but it's Astrid Lindgren's (yes, of Pippi Longstocking fame) adaptation of a Scandanavian poem on that topic that really has us transfixed. A tomte is the soul of the farm's first occupant, and was provided with a bowl of porridge by the inhabitants each night, either to eat himself or to share with animals that came looking for easy prey. I suspect that the tradition was a useful one because a fox (as in the story) would discover the bowl of porridge before making it into the henhouse, fill its belly, and then be less inclined to risk life and limb going after the farmer's chickens. Fascinating, and a fun book to look at and read. Tomte, also called nisse, are also featured in The Hidden Folk, above. This book is peaceful, poetic, and slightly eerie; this tomte is hollow-looking but takes a paternal approach. | $7 on Amazon.com

The Mermaid's Treasure: Although it looks to be (and is) one of those odd, puffy-plastic-covered books which hardly seems to have a credited author (it's Stephanie Peters), this book is full of mermaid lore pitched at pre-teens on down through enough lift-the-flaps to keep kids busy for hours of exploratory reading. Full of detailed, meticulously painted maps of mermaid lands and cities, encyclopedic reviews of mermaid paraphernalia, and several mermaid stories, it also catalogs mermaid types from around the world, and doesn't neglect to put them in the context of their originating cultures. | A steal at $13.50 on Amazon.com, down from $20 list.

- Jeremiah