A few times a year at my daughter’s elementary school, students troop into the gymnasium for what I like to call the Awarding of the Abstract Nouns. One by one, kids are called up to receive certificates that celebrate their outstanding achievements in the fields of Perseverance, Empathy, Cooperation, and Integrity. My own daughter once came home with the Fairness Award – a quality she is always very eager to point out the absence of in any situation, and loudly.

I always wonder just how genuine a child’s engagement is with abstract concepts like fairness and cooperation. Certainly, we adults do everything we can, while kids are still too young to roll their eyes at the idea of moral instruction, to cram their minds with upstanding nouns.

Bella’s Blessings, the debut picture book by Albertan author Brenda Stokes and B.C. illustrator Trisha DesRosiers, is a classic morally instructional story. It has all the hallmarks of the genre: a certain cloying earnestness of tone, a lack of subtlety in the delivery of its message, and a binary vision of childhood in which children always feel bad when they’re being bad, and good when they’re being good. What saves the book from feeling like a sermon is the deep vein of emotion and sweetness running through it. The story coats its heavy load of medicine with a bowlful of sugar.

Bella is a little beaver with an open-hearted demeanor and a never-explained pair of what appear to be tiny leaves growing out of the top of her head. When she is born, her grandmother goes in search of a stone. When she finds one that seems smooth and special, she writes “Love” on it, and places it in the bottom of a bag she has knit herself. The word and the stone are a blessing. “I am so blessed to have you as my grandkit,” she tells the baby. “In return I shall bless you each spring.”

Bella proves to be a loving child, able to charm the crustiest river creatures. The following spring, Grandma Beaver writes “Dedication” on a stone, and drops that in the bag. Bella then finds the will to stick with the dance lessons she has asked to join. And so on through “Honesty,” “Beauty,” “Kindness,” and, when Grandma falls ill and is about to leave the young beaver forever, “Courage.” Bella is soon blessed with a younger brother, for whom she sews a blessing bag, into which she drops a stone marked “Love.”

It’s a genuinely touching, if not particularly thrilling, little tale. DesRosiers’ illustrations are cute and keep the anthro­pomorphizing under control, so the animals still look roughly animal-like. But the images are nearly as repetitive as the prose and do little to relieve its earnestness.

That earnestness occasionally shades into primness, especially when Bella discovers that “Honesty” means not telling your father fantastical stories. When she awakes with a bellyful of guilt and confesses her obvious mendacity, this reader wanted to slip her a stone marked “Imagination” to counteract all the well-intentioned finger-wagging. Lessons about lying are one thing, but what Bella was up to was a little telling of tall tales. How else are you supposed to entertain yourself when you live in a windowless beaver dam.

Wishes, by kid-lit veterans Jean Little and Geneviève Côté, is a much simpler and livelier affair. It, too, has a moral current, but one that is much more implicit, and that does everything it can to batter down the idea that there is only good behaviour and bad behaviour, and never the twain shall meet. Wishes exists in a moral multiverse, where the only real imperative is that children should try to enjoy themselves – if they can do that while doing the right thing, then all the better.

The book is a riff on the old saying “if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” Little begins with the expression (substituting “poor folks” for “beggars”), then proceeds to flip the saying’s insistence on practicality and realism into something that celebrates fun and freedom. What if wishes really were horses – would the downtrodden get the rides they’ve been promised? And if wishes can be horses, what else can they be? A lot, apparently: “If wishes were ice cream, our cones would be doubles. If wishes were soapsuds, we’d blow shining bubbles.”

Côté’s watercolour images are energetic and gleeful, and give Little’s text room to resonate. The rhymes and structure are simple, but Little has such command of her material that she is able to switch between the lyrical and the prosaic: “If wishes were skylarks, the sky would be singing. If wishes were ball games, my bat would be swinging.” She can also subtly undermine the very premise of the book: “If wishes were rowboats, I’d take my dad fishing and we’d catch our supper with no need for wishing.”

The meaning of the original expression about horses and beggars is that nothing gets done through wishing alone. Wishes demonstrates that getting nothing done is an important part of being a child, and what could be wrong with that?