Leonard S. Marcus is the author, most recently, of "Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children's Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators From Around the World."

Children have a knack for finding the signs and wonders they need to feel at home in the world. They find them where and when they can. Resilient Madeline, in the Ludwig Bemelmans classic, spies a friendly rabbit crouching in the crack-lines of her orphanage dormitory ceiling. Maurice Sendak's Max sees in the four plain bedposts of his own dreary room the first intimations of the untamed forest of his dreams.

A similar capacity for reimagining animates THE BOY AND THE ELEPHANT (Random House Studio, 38 pp., $19.99, ages 4 to 8), a wordless picture book by the Australian illustrator Freya Blackwood. In it, a small, shy, daydreamy boy takes refuge from big-city commotion, and the arrival of a new baby at home, in a nearby vacant lot where he decides a clump of old trees is actually an elephant -- a fellow outlier and protective spirit who will always be there when he needs a friend.

Always, that is, until developers get hold of the lot and mark the trees for clearing in the coming days. Can the boy save his friend?

Blackwood's immersive, large-format illustrations blend firmly sketched outlines of people and places with a luminous haze of gossamer, soft-focus color -- an evocative mix of the fuzzy and the fixed meant to mirror the juddering fluidity of an imaginative child's changeable awareness. Her metamorphic drawings of the story's trees show just how they could be recast as a lordly mammal in the mind of a young daydreamer with a flair for make-believe. (Blackwood even manages the visual pun of having one type of trunk morph into another.)

In several illustrations, multiple images of the boy appear as sequenced vignettes that allow us to track the child's transformation from lonesome little guy to someone who, as he comes to grips with the loss of his woodlot haven, learns to keep faith with the intangible treasure of his own imagination. If an elephant can be imagined, he realizes, it can be imagined to move from one locale to another.

In the book's climactic scene Blackwood finds a most dramatic way to effect the mighty pachyderm's transfer to the row of shade trees that line the front of the boy's school. We see then that the imaginary elephant has acquired a few imaginary friends of his own (a rhino, a giraffe, a camel) -- a hint perhaps that the boy himself has now become ready to hang with his peers.

Adults in search of picture books to share with young children often pass over wordless options for fear of not knowing how to "read" them. In Blackwood's, happily, the well-mapped-out scenes lend themselves to the visual equivalent of an exploratory walk around the neighborhood and the main plot points are easily discerned. The fantasy appeal of the young protagonist's imaginative projections may even prompt a game of "find the elephant in the room."

Grown-ups hardly figure in Blackwood's story. But in HEAD IN THE CLOUDS (Elsewhere Editions, 40 pp., $19.95, ages 3 to 6), by the Spanish artist Rocío Araya, translated by Sarah Moses, we're treated to a lively exchange between a hidebound schoolteacher and a feisty student, the latter of whom requests time out from their regular classroom routine so she can ask some of the burning questions that have been building up inside her: questions like "Can you measure a cloud?," "Can you be good and happy at the same time?" and "Why must grown-ups explain everything to us?"

From "The Emperor's New Clothes" to "The Little Prince," "Pippi Longstocking," "Charlotte's Web" and beyond, the suggestion that children are the wise ones in our midst and adults often don't recognize their own foolishness or ignorance has been one of modern children's literature's defining through lines. In recent years, picture books featuring nuggets of childlike sagacity in question form have become a mini genre.

In the battle of wits Araya sets in motion, the teacher can barely tolerate the rascally child's inquisitiveness, which she dismisses with a rueful sigh: "Oh, Sofía! You must see so many birds with your head in the clouds!" Suffice it to say the unfazed wunderkind has the perfect comeback up her sleeve.

Araya, it soon becomes apparent, is as much addressing the adults who read her book aloud as she is the children who may be listening to it. To both audiences, the message is that the best learning starts not with a predetermined answer or set of facts in mind but with a question or daydream.

Her illustrations (which she presents as possibly being Sofía's own artwork) make the same claim visually. Araya's preference for coloring outside the lines, for painting in bold, broad, thickly applied brushstrokes and for combining paint with a well-choreographed jumble of collaged, sketched and hand-lettered elements points to the value of remaining fearlessly open to life's accidents and surprises. Having a head in the clouds is not just for the birds.