THINK OF A CHILD'S MIND AS A GARDEN. Obviously what adults plant in that garden affects it; unfortunately, children's books often have shallow roots in the soil of immediate social trends and problems, as well as market demands. Finding good books that go deep is difficult. For example, five out of the seven new books under review here are about understanding other cultures (the sixth is about avoiding environmental disaster, the seventh about tap-dancing). Such sameness of subject matter is troubling. Yet most of these books display tempting beauty and offer medicinal uses. And one, which stands alone because it examines the author's own culture closely, belongs in horticulturalist's heaven.

Neither the title nor the cover of Michele Marineau's The Road to Chlifa (Northern Lights/Red Deer College, 144 pages, $9.95 paper), translated by Susan Ouriou, does justice to this story of life-destroying war, soul- destroying peace, and young love. (I might have titled it Anemones and asked the cover illustrator to scatter these red flowers across a mountainside to represent the blood of gods on Mount Lebanon.) The story, which won the 1992 Governor General's Award in its original French edition, is about a 17-year-old Lebanese boy adjusting to life in Montreal after escaping war-blasted Beirut. Karim's simmering rage explodes when crass, bullying, racist French Canadian students molest a fellow refugee, a Vietnamese girl. Then, recovering in hospital from a near-fatal knife wound suffered while rescuing the girl, he makes sense of his ordeals in his homeland where his first and second loves both died violently. Although stretches of the story read like a mere travel guide, the climax is truly poignant and the resolution thoughtful.

War, young love, and racism also figure prominently in Rosalie's Battles (Ragweed, 91 pages, $5.95 paper), by Ginette Anfousse, a former winner of the Mr. Christie Award. Translated by Linda Gaboriau and part of a series for children aged 10 to 13 that includes Rosalie's Big Dream (about tap-dancing, friendship, and dreams), Rosalie's Battles begins with a racism-based fight among schoolchildren and leads to revelations about the sufferings of true victims of war. But what Rosalie learns about a Vietnamese girl who has been thoroughly traumatized during her family's flight from Hanoi does not move the reader. Rosalie herself is too cute, with her tiresome repetition of the epithet "holy hopping horrors," her silly misadventures with "Sergeant Celery," and her pursuit of her "Viking hero" boyfriend, Pierre- Yves. (Tap-dancing is as serious as she should get.) Perhaps, since Rosalie is a stylized, comic character, the problems with Rosalie's Battles (the original French version was a finalist for the 1988 Governor General's Award) are not so much in the translation as in cultural differences: humor does not seem to cross cultural barriers as easily as does tragedy.

A more successful treatment of racism for the same age group is Valerie Lupini's There Goes the Neighborhood (Northern Lights/Red Deer College, 111 pages, $8.95 paper). The changing demographics of a middle-class Vancouver neighborhood cause tensions between established whites and newly arrived Asians. Ivy and Carla spray-paint a hostile message on the latest home to be built by Hong Kong immigrants, but their resistance cannot stop change. Carla and her family move away and yet another Hong Kong family moves in. Ivy, having no one else to play with, befriends a girl her own age in this family. The girl, Yin Sai, learns about Vancouver wildlife (and toasted marshmallows) from Ivy, and Ivy learns about Bangkok pollution (and fried snake) from her. Then, because of feng shui, a Chinese belief, Yin Sai's uncle cuts down the giant sequoia trees on the property where Ivy's beloved grandmother lived until her death just three months earlier, and Ivy's own beliefs are assaulted. The friendship between the two girls survives, but not without a painful new growth of understanding. The success of this book is largely due, I think, to the sober, carefully observed portraits of the children and their cultural differences.

Sobriety verges on self-righteousness in Lesley Choyce's Big Burn (Thistledown, 215 pages, $7.95 paper). Yet, although there is a moral, this fast-paced novel is more glib than tedious. And although there is a formula, the novel is more earnest than slick. "Work the power of the wind," the lesson 16-year-old Chris learns from windsurfing, is also a metaphor for manipulating the social system to vanquish evil. The system is ruled to a great extent by public opinion, which is in turn influenced by mass media. The evil is large, irresponsible companies processing hazardous waste improperly.

Plot: two young people learn how to save the environment; or, boy meets girl, boy and girl meet dead birds, boy and girl and dead birds meet companies head on, and win. Subplots: Chris and Marina fall in love; Chris's father finds a new job as an environmental consultant, and Marina's mother finds a new life after widowhood; Jack the seagull learns to fly with an artificial wing. The book is meant to appeal to adolescent idealism while also providing believable romance and suspenseful excitement (as when Chris on his frail windsurfer confronts a freighter built like an "army tank" and carrying hazardous waste). No doubt Big Burn would be useful supplementary reading for high- school classes studying the environment.

Now where does Eileen Kernaghan's Dance of the Snow Dragon (Thistledown, 324 pages, $7.95 paper) fit in? Sword and sorcery for spiritual seekers? Historical fiction-fantasy for Far East fanciers? This is a valiant and occasionally profound attempt at a coming-of-age story to beat all. Set in 18th-century Bhutan and, according to the back-cover blurb, "based on Tibetan Buddhist accounts of the mystical journey to Shambhala, beyond the furthest snow peaks," this relatively long novel is lushly cinematic with visual splendours of flora, fauna, costume, and creature -- magic, dreamed, real, and combinations thereof. It is also quite dull. Despite the many ingenious trials and exotic hazards that Sangay the young protagonist must meet on his path from lowly yak herder to exalted hero, the action is static and repetitive, and the characters flat. But then these seemingly negative effects are to some extent deliberate. Dance of the Snow Dragon is, after all, plotted so as to illustrate the Great Mandala or vision that in turn illustrates the essence of the universe in "circles within circles, squares within squares, a bewildering complexity of color and shape and pattern." Ultimately, all of Sangay's adventures are imagined.

Sorry I am a stubborn Near Westerner. I believe that life exists, and that emotional engagement is a necessary part of it -- and of literature too.

I am far more admiring of another Westerner whose family lived for three generations in the Far East and who approaches the foreign culture with diffidence, irony, and self-awareness. Jean Little's His Banner Over Me (Viking, 205 pages, $18.99 cloth) is loosely based on the life of her mother, Flora Gauld. The book is not politically correct: it is about a child of English-Canadian missionaries in Taiwan, but it expresses few reservations about the imperialism of being there saving "poor heathen souls" from "worshipping idols and going straight to Hell." Nor does it apologize for examining Flora's culture to the eventual exclusion of the host culture. Furthermore, the book breaks the unwritten rule in contemporary Canadian children's fiction of short time and one place: it covers Flora's entire childhood and youth, touching on even her adulthood and death, and it takes place in two countries and four households. Also, it does not offer a neatly packaged, simplistic solution to a complex situation: Flora's childhood is difficult and her parents flawed, but she does not stage a rebellion that cures all. It is mature writing that is emotionally as well as intellectually engaging, and is so deeply rooted in one period and one milieu that its truths about love are, I suspect, universal.

Roots. Important things, those. And each of these books, except perhaps Rosalie's Battles, deserves some place in the metaphorical flowerbed, I suppose. But why can't more children's books be about the offbeat, the unthinkable, the hidden, the unfashionable? Why can't they be far from the screaming headlines and marketing crowd? A book of the stature of Little's His Banner Over Me holds the soil and feeds the soil; but it's a rare find, and the lack of diversity is surely not ecologically sound. Ideally, how does my garden grow? The silver bells are the music of divine inspiration. The cockleshells, the natural wonders of the world around us every day. The pretty maids, the unexpected beauty in the penetrating eye of a singular beholder.