In Alice (Bantam: $15; ages 3-7), actress...

In Alice (Bantam: $15; ages 3-7), actress Whoopi Goldberg updates “Alice in Wonderland” as the story of a girl who thinks she’s won the lottery only to realize--after several hair-raising adventures on the way to claim her prize--that it was just one of those sleazy Florida swampland scams. (Two buddies, an invisible rabbit named Salvador De Rabbit and an eccentric, top-hatted card player named Robin, are there to pick up the pieces when Alice’s bubble breaks.)

Would Lewis Carroll approve of this much poetic license? Probably not. But picture-book fans will appreciate John Rocco’s imaginative, airbrushy artwork (especially the scene in which the three adventurers stop for burgers and the entire diner starts shrinking). And the pictures fit Whoopi’s breezy storytelling wonderfully well.

Next, wouldn’t you love to see Whoopi bring “Jabberwocky” into the 20th Century?

Michael Dorris, author of “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water” and “The Crown of Columbus” (co-written with his wife, novelist Louise Erdrich), makes a more-than-promising debut as a children’s book author with Morning Girl (Hyperion: $12.95; ages 8-12).

This brief, poetic novel is set in the 15th Century among the Taino, the island people who greeted Columbus when he first set foot in the New World. The story alternates its focus between Morning Girl and her dreamy little brother, Star Boy, who spends much of his time--when not gazing at the constellations or pretending he’s a rock--bugging his older sister.

The children’s strong connections to nature, a part of Native American culture powerfully conveyed here, are imperiled from Morning Girl’s first glimpses of a canoe bearing several strangely dressed, rotund men. The story ends before the boat comes ashore, but by then Dorris has so successfully immersed us in the Taino worldview that we shudder to think about what comes next. This sad, lovely and timely tale gives us an alternative view of America’s “discovery.”

Of related interest is Rising Voices: Writings of Young Native Americans (Scribners: $12.95; ages 8 and up), poems and essays selected by Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Beverly R. Singer in reaction to, in the words of one young contributor, “the Whiteman from Europe, who is still a foreigner, a man who has hurt us deeply, but has shown us how not to be.”

The trademark hero of young-adult author Ron Koertge, a professor of English at Pasadena City College, appears in The Harmony Arms (Joy Street / Little, Brown, $15.95; ages 12 and up) in the guise of a 14-year-old named Gabriel. Gabriel is yet another sensitive young guy on the cusp of manhood, eager to plunge headlong into love if it weren’t for the fact of being utterly paralyzed by self-doubt.

Our hero has lit out from the Midwest for Los Angeles to spend a month with his father, an amiable man named Sumner who’s trying to cut a movie deal based on the adventures of Timmy the Otter (a hand puppet with whom Sumner embarrasses his son to death several times a day). Skinny ribs and all, Gabriel manages to find a girlfriend, Tess (involved in making a video memoir of her life entitled “Mondo Tess”), and two best pals--a 90-ish nudist and animal-rights activist named Mr. Palmer and a washed-up clairvoyant named Cassandra, who though nearly always tipsy still manages to see the important things clearly.

Koertge’s previous comic romances were unqualified successes; one, “The Boy in the Moon” (Avon: $3.99), is just out in paper. “The Harmony Arms” is, happily, no exception.

The persecution of European Jews and the horrors of the Holocaust continue to be subjects about which many quality books for young readers are written. Karen Hesse’s Letters From Rivka (Henry Holt: $14.95; ages 10 and up) tells the fictionalized story of the author’s aunt and her triumph over what most would see as insurmountable obstacles on her way to safety and freedom in America in the 1920s.

And Isabella Leitner’s memoir, The Big Lie, written with her husband, Irving Leitner, and illustrated by Judy Pedersen (Scholastic: $12.95; ages 7-10), is a moving, true account of how one teen-aged Hungarian Jew survives the disappearance of nearly her entire family in the Nazi death camps. Leitner’s simple narrative (“Dr. Mengele sent Mama and my sister Potyo to the left. ‘Be strong,’ Mama cried as she left us. ‘I love you.’ ”) communicates the tragedy of this time far better than any dry history book could.

Both books provide good introductions to historical issues from which much can be learned about present-day incidences of hate crimes and racism.

Taking place just after World War II, Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey Home (Aladdin: $3.95; ages 8 and up) is one teen-ager’s affecting fictional tale of coming home to Berkeley from months spent in an internment camp for California’s Japanese-American population . . . The first batch of books in Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s good-looking new young-adult series called “Aerial Fiction” ($3.95 each) includes several classics: A Parcel of Patterns, Jill Paton Walsh’s chilling historical novel of the bubonic plague’s toll on one small village in 17th-Century England; Like the Lion’s Tooth by Marjorie Kellogg, a grim, suspenseful story about two abused brothers by the author of “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon,” and--luckily for happy-ending lovers--Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden’s gripping 1982 novel of a romance between two Brooklyn high-school girls.