Kind ¦ Fair ¦ Reliable ¦ Honest

There is an interesting idea behind these four attractively illustrated picture books - each volume tells two stories and each of the two stories is then told again but from the viewpoint of a different character. The stories are concerned with familiar, everyday events for most older juniors - copying homework, lending a bike, promising to feed a friend's pet - and each is written to highlight a moral dilemma from differing points of view. The purpose is to help children from about eight to eleven years old consider motivation, the idea of responsibility or blame, the point of view of others and the difficulty of doing the right thing, even when you know what that is.

I have a slight reservation about the organisation of the stories - it might have been clearer if the two versions of each story had followed one another, instead of being alternated with the other story in each book. Otherwise, these are valuable contributions to P.S.E. in the school library and they will be excellent teachers' resources for assembly or social and moral education discussions.

Whether children will want to read them for themselves is another matter. I have not tested them with young readers but I just suspect that their obvious worthiness and overt moral agenda might be off-putting. The writing, too, is adequate rather than brilliant and there are many authors whose work is of genuinely literary quality through which children can explore moral dilemmas with more subtlety.