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Nate the Great is 30! The classic children’s book character created by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and illustrated by Caldecott Award winner Marc Simont has reached a major milestone. But don’t look for the young detective to hang up his cloak and magnifying glass quite yet. Sharmat, along with her trusted band of co-authors, is still cranking out Nate tales left and right, and in honor of the sleuth’s 30th anniversary, a new hardcover edition of the first mystery in the series, Nate the Great, originally published in 1972, was recently released. For Sharmat, writing is all about family. With the help of Mitchell, her husband of 46 years and an author in his own right, Sharmat has just finished her 24th Nate the Great title, which is set to be published in October 2003. And this is not the first book Sharmat has co-authored with a family member. Her sister, Rosalind Weinman, helped pen several titles, and her son, Craig Sharmat, a musical director, has collaborated on a few as well, including Nate the Great and the Musical Note.

The author has always based her characters on those near and dear to her. The title character, a young pancake-hungry detective, was inspired by her father, Nathan Weinman, who was often called Nate by his friends. “A novel I had written previous to the Nate books featured my mother and sister,” explains Sharmat. “So when the idea came into my head for the young detective character, I thought it was time for my father to be in a book, too.” But Sharmat didn’t stop there. “I wasn’t finished with my other relatives,” she explains, “so I named the other characters in the book after them.” Her sister Rosalind became the feline-loving Rosamond. Her uncle Harry became the mischievous young Harry. And her mother Anne played a part as Nate’s friend Annie. And those are just the characters in the first book. Sharmat admits that many of the events in her books have been inspired by things that have happened to her friends and relatives. “My sister and I recalled an instance when our father got a phone call down to the family business in the middle of the night to deal with an attempted robbery,” says Sharmat. “That turned into Nate the Great and the Pillowcase.” In another title, Sharmat recollects how her sister’s scarf flew away. “Often it’s something that somebody says to me that inspires me,” admits Sharmat, “It can be just one sentence and then I’m off.” But Sharmat’s inspiration isn’t completely based on others. She herself is a part-time, amateur detective. “I love mysteries,” she admits. “When things go wrong, I take an interest, and I love to find things.” And find things she does. Like the perfect literary niche for her Nate stories. “At the time I wrote the first Nate the Great, 30 years ago, easy reading books were just starting to become popular,” says Sharmat, “And I wanted to make this book, inspired by my father, easy to read.” It was as simple as that. The book was quickly accepted by Putnam, which was just starting an easy reading program. The acceptance letter arrived on her father’s birthday. And shortly thereafter, the book was reviewed by Gene Shalit on the Today show. That night when Sharmat’s father went to the synagogue, everyone started calling him Nate the Great. “It was wonderful,” recalls Sharmat. Sadly, before the second title was published, Sharmat’s father passed away. “I told him before he died that I would continue writing the Nate stories,” the author says, “I knew that I would whether or not they were published because I felt that Nate was such a strong character, and he was based on such a wonderful man.” Recently, Nate has appeared in a New York Times crossword puzzle and decorated the front of 28 million Cheerios boxes to promote children’s literacy. He is also on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. After 30 years, Sharmat still doesn’t know where Nate the Great will lead her next. “This was never a preplanned series,” says Sharmat, “and often Nate writes himself book by book.” Sharmat tries to come up with the solution to every case before she starts writing, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes it’s her husband Mitchell who comes up with the crux of the case. “He has so many intriguing ideas,” says Sharmat, “He is always my first editor, and it’s been a very happy collaboration.”

Poor Rosie Roselli. She’s a shining young star at her Catholic school as Sister Celestia can attest but no one at home has time to notice her accomplishments. That’s because she’s Smack Dab in the Middle of her large Italian family, which includes grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, a sister, a brother and 12 cousins. They’re all busy taking care of babies or responding to the older kids’ demands and schedules.

In this classic tale of the overlooked middle child, Rosie comes home from school toting a gold star for her good counting work and a bright red horn for her musical ability, but day after day, everyone’s too busy to notice. Author-illustrator Anita Riggio writes of the middle child’s plight from her own experience, explaining, “Rosie Roselli really needed a hug. She needed a hug right this minute, but her mother’s arms were full of Rosie’s sister. Rosie Roselli couldn’t wait.” After several days of this type of treatment, Rosie gives up and decides to do what any self-respecting “feeling neglected” child might run away.

Of course, Rosie’s story has a happy ending, and she ends up smack dab in the middle of a huge family hug. Riggio’s exuberant art has a 1950s retro feel, showing teenage girls in poodle skirts, fathers in ties, Rosie with saddle shoes and kids in Mickey Mouse Club attire. Her colorful, near silhouette-style figures are done in India ink, gouache, cut paper, stamps and, last but not least, with the help of a computer. Rosie, who remains in white amidst her “colorful” family, always stands apart, the center of the book.

Sister Celestia a religious figure rarely seen nowadays in young children’s books, excepting Madeleine brings to mind the effervescent Singing Nun. She’s a ball of energy, realizing that Rosie is a star. When she gives her students an assignment to draw a family portrait, she saves the day for our heroine.

Smack Dab in the Middle is a book to which many children will relate, because, no matter how many or how few siblings a family contains, parents are always too busy at certain moments to lavish their kids with attention. So roll on, Rosie! The energy of this little twirling character will never be lost, even in a crowd.

When I was only three or four, my parents took me to New York to spend a few days at the Plaza Hotel. The visit held a special thrill, not only because my mother and father had met in New York and knew the hotel’s Oak Room and Oyster Bar and Palm Court of old, but also because of Eloise. Tangled, hoydenish, extroverted and newly outfitted with pleated pinafore, I was the double of the storybook character whose life-sized portrait already hung in the hotel hallway. The Plaza staff called me Eloise. So did the buggy driver who, in those pre-litigious days, lifted me to sit on the back of his horse. I was in heaven. Why not? I was Eloise at the Plaza.

If you did not know Eloise in her 1950s, high-fashion heyday Eloise, who lived at the Plaza with her presumably divorced and well-compensated mother; her Nanny; Weenie the dog and Skipperdee the turtle; Eloise, who, having conquered her New York audience, went on to captivate and infuriate the Parisians and even the Muscovites if you have never experienced Eloise, you simply have not lived. And now, with the long-delayed publication of Eloise Takes a Bawth you can begin, preferably while waving about a glass of champagne and perhaps making your daughter tipsy as well as yourself.

The creation of the late Kay Thompson (who also caricatured high society as the fashion editor in the Hepburn-Astaire movie Funny Face), Eloise is a joyously unconstrained explosion of hedonism, a natural anarchist with an affection for the entire world and a true scapegrace’s knack of squeezing out of the inevitable consequences of her impulsiveness. A sort of Caliban of cultural pretentiousness, she speaks in an almost jazz-riff tumble of rhymes and advertising-speak. Part infuriating brat, part Pippi Longstocking and altogether insouciant observer of society’s foibles, she is the classic poor little rich girl, but with enough spunk and imagination (an extraordinarily vivid one) to fill her life with a surrogate family and that includes pretty much everyone at the Plaza. Thompson’s arch collaborator Hilary Knight, whose drawings of Eloise are easily half the story, recognized the Plaza as the funhouse it could be to a child’s eye, even without the Carnival masque of the plot. The pigeons that populate the windowsills become Baroque-like doves lifting the corners of concealing draperies. The bas-relief Cupids over the doorways steal glances at the action below. Beds are canopied and crowned with ostrich plumes; visiting celebrities’ noses point straight up in absolute contrast to their equally sharp high heels.

Eloise Takes a Bawth, the fifth installment of her misadventures, was originally scheduled for publication in 1964 but never released. Finally, almost 30 years later, Hilary Knight and the estate of Kay Thompson agreed to let Simon &and Schuster publish the book, which was completed “with a little help from” writer Mart Crowley. Eloise displays all her amazing inventiveness and oblivious destructiveness by flooding the hotel on the day of a huge Carnival ball. The water in Knight’s illustrations is a pale blue wash of fantasy that gradually pervades the black-and-white reality of the structure, while the bathtub that is the crucible for this crisis grows magically larger, from swimming pool to dinghy to bay to ocean to pirate’s lagoon. These days, of course, children are more accustomed to special effects, and Bawth offers a couple in the form of two gatefold illustrations, one opening vertically and the other horizontally. The first shows the hotel’s facade peeled back to expose a Rube Goldberg-ish vision of the piping and a score of frantic plumbers hunting the elusive leak. The other, which serves both as a visual and dramatic climax, is a brilliantly illuminated carnival scene, complete with swags and masks and guests up to their waists in water, somehow thinking the situation too too clever. The humor may have more layers for older readers, but children will have no trouble spotting the Esther Williams-style water chorus line, or the apparently omnipresent Eloise as acrobat, gondolier, maitresse and guest of honor (or the fact that most of the food appears to be the stuff of six-year-old fantasies, such as ice cream sundaes). Eloise Takes a Bawth is like a Roman candle going off to explode all those drearily realistic and heavy-handed children’s books. It is its own celebration and should be a must on Christmas lists for all ages. Eve Zibart writes for The Washington Post.

Perhaps it’s understandable to feel a bit ambivalent about Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In his films he was ever-smiling, never angry, always dancing, deferential even to the likes of Shirley Temple. But the fact is, Bill Robinson (Luther Robinson till he forced his brother to swap names with him) was a genius, possibly the greatest tap dancer who ever lived. Even now practitioners of the art don’t quite know how he made his moves.

Bojangles was a child star, though an obscure one, who started dancing when he was 6 in beer gardens in his native Richmond, Virginia. Around the time he turned 8, he began to tour with Mayme Remington’s dance troupe, later joining the vaudeville circuit and working for 25 years in the black theater. By the time he was discovered by white audiences, at age 50, he was making about $3,500 a week.

Leo and Diane Dillon’s children’s book Rap A Tap Tap: Here’s Bojangles Think of That! is a charming tribute to the dancer. The book follows Bojangles, painted as a long-legged and handsome young man, as he dances in and out of the lives of folks going about their daily business. Shopkeepers, shoppers, musicians, a bunch of swells on their way to a nightclub, poor folks warming their hands above a barrel fire all are blessed with a moment of astonished joy thanks to Bojangles’ flying feet. The book’s end finds the hoofer triumphant rich and famous in tie and tails.

Created from washes of warm color that allow the reader to see one wall of a building through another, or an elevated subway track through a tree, the Dillons’ illustrations are cleverly used to capture Bojangles’ journey and his fancy feet, which are presented in multiple-exposure fashion. This new book from a pair of celebrated storytellers includes an afterword with information about Bojangles’ life. Rap A Tap Tap is an ingenious introduction to the legendary dancer. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.