Yuck, how disgusting - The Gooey, Chewy, Rumble, Plop Book by Steve Alton and Nick Sharratt (Bodley Head, £9.99) is not for the squeamish, writes Philippa Logan. And it's probably best not to look at it just before a meal, because it's all about our insides - more specifically, about the digestive process.

There are lots of fearsome pop-ups, gross close-ups, and revolting flaps, all bristling with information you may or may not wish to know. Children should love it.

One far more traditional pop-up ground is a beautifully illustrated book with a pop-up climax: The Old Tree (Walker, £9.99). This has Ruth Brown's characteristically old-fashioned' drawings, and a charming story about the animals in the wood, working together to save their tree from the axe.

Opening flaps is always fun, of course, and there are flaps aplenty in Dear Mermaid by Alan Durant (Walker, £9.99). These flaps have letters inside them - letters between a little girl on her seaside holiday and a mermaid. The two set up quite a chain of correspondence. Gorgeous illustrations by Vanessa Cabban make this book splendidly sumptuous.

Animals lend themselves to story-telling, and George, the Dragon and the Princess by Chris Wormell (Jonathan Cape, £10.99) is a minimalist story for the very young - lovely huge pictures, and few words. Perfect for reading aloud. Maisy Big, Maisy Small has even fewer words: it's a book of opposites, with Lucy Cousins' inimitable style that uses bold, solid colours (Walker, £9.99).

I can't help thinking that Harry Hill's book The Further Adventures of the Queen Mum (Faber, £12.99) would appeal more to adults than to children. The Queen Mum, as we know, has died and gone to heaven. But what we don't know is that God has a job for her, and keeps sending her back down to earth to do good deeds - to help a mugger and a drug-ridden supermodel see the error of their ways, to combat global warming, and so on. At night, she pops back up to heaven to play noughts and crosses with Henry VIII or to eat ham and eggs with Mother Teresa.

It's a very funny, affectionate book, but the jokes and themes are somewhat grown-up, and it is rather long for a bedtime story.

However, it is endearingly amusing, and I'm sure the Queen Mum herself would have a good giggle at it. Then again, perhaps it's not a children's book after all.

It can be a bit of a shock to discover you are pregnant with twins, writes Maggie Hartford. Oxford artist Mini Grey brings her unusual eye to the situation in a collaboration with Dick King Smith called The Twin Giants (Walker, £7.99). When the first giant was born, his father said: "He's e-Normous." When the second came out, his mother said: "There's a-Lot-ov-im."

We follow Normous and Lotovim as they grow up together, then search for wives, and have their own twin babies. It's a delightful book, which would be ideal as a present for twins - or perhaps for a sibling who has to put up with the e-normous effect that twins have on family life.

Mini, a former teacher who lives in East Oxford, got her unusual name because she was born in a Mini.

Her award-winning, surreal picture book The DIsh and the Spoon, which re-creates the nursery rhyme in 1930s New York gangsterland, has just come out in paperback (Red Fox, £5.99).