THE MAGIC WORLD OF LEARNING. Big Fish. pound;14.99.

All created by Jay Young

Books that are not quite proper books have always filled me with a certain suspicion. But as publishers, authors and designers vie for children’s attention with the ever more sophisticated visuals and special effects of the computer world, there are, it seems, no limits to what they will come up with in terms of so-called novelty books.

Magnificent Mazes by Anna Nilsen did not at first win me over. It was not immediately clear what you were supposed to do with its busy pathways, coloured spots and holes in the pages, let alone what the book might actually be telling you once you had figured this out. But my far more visually literate children fell on this book, the nine-year-old returning to it again and again.

We found ourselves playing an entertaining time travel game, with an eclectic through-the-ages cast - from Homer and Eric the Red to Mozart and Neil Armstrong - who wander through the maze in search of three special items, diving backwards and forwards, page to page through time tunnels, until they arrive back in their own time zone. Factual information is kept to a minimum: any period detail is in the pictures.

Jay Young’s Magic Fact Machine volumes employ an intriguing piece of technology which causes children to gasp in amazement - literally - as a spinning “magic finger” on a silver circle points out the correct answers to questions.

The books avoid long explanations in favour of snippets of information so that children with good background knowledge, particularly of science, are more likely to enjoy themselves. The questions vary in difficulty and quirkiness from, for example, “what is a willy-willy?” (answer: a violent storm) to “who showed that burning is a chemical reaction?” (answer: Antoine Lavoisier, 1743-94). Some of the answers are to be found on the page, others not.

But the danger here is that children will become so absorbed in the magic finger technology (the finger has to be fixed and rotated correctly to produce the right answer) that they will neglect to read the rather small print gobbets around the outside of the page.

Magic World of Learning applies its “magic finger” to a far simpler, pre-school world of information - animals, colours, numbers, and so on. While attractively designed and illustrated, this is not a book that small children will be able to operate without the patient attention of an adult. And everyone is likely to be driven mad by the magic finger getting lost: all three of these books would have benefited from some sort of pocket attachment.

Diana Hinds