Picture books are notoriously hard to get right. Just ask any parent; or, at least, one who still bothers to partake in the increasingly endangered tradition of the bedtime story.

How many times have you picked up a lavishly illustrated volume, only to realise, with heavy heart, that it is utter tripe?

Yes, the pictures are pretty, but the story is a joke. You know: it’s utterly unengaging, the characters are weak, unappealing or just not believable. Or (shudder) it is written in that archaic lobotomised nursery style so beloved of minor-league children’s writers.

You grimace as you read it, your kids bore instantly, and you throw it back into the bookcase where it remains – ready for its one-way ticket to the Oxfam shop.

Out of our bookcase of, let’s say, 50 picture books, no more than eight receive requests for re-telling. And only one of them has been written in the past decade, which is a terrible indictment on the genre.

So how do the latest editions fare?

Let’s start with one of the best. First is a new imprint in a series of what, I am sure, will become a classic – Benedict Blathwayt’s Little Red Train series. Busy Day (Red Fox, £5.99), is both beautifully illustrated and engagingly written.

It tells the unremarkable story of the eponymous loco’s hectic shift delivering gravel, sleepers and rails for a new section of track, sheep to a farm, mail to a post office and daytrippers to the beach.

There’s nothing to it. And that’s the beauty. It’s written in a glorious ‘clickety clack’ train rhythm, with fabulous artwork, which reveals something new each time you pick it up. Oh, and, it has a map of the route with a proper key, a diagram of how a steam train works, and cutaways of station buildings and rolling stock. Talk about learning without realising it.

For more overt education, North American Animals, by Dawn Allette and illustrated by Alan Baker, (Tamarind Books, £5.99) isn’t bad if you’re American, Canadian or Mexican, or are heading that way. Otherwise it’s probably a bit baffling.

It’s clever though – being a complete, and literal, A-Z of American wildlife from armadillo to zebra longwing butterfly, by way of bison, lynx and wolverine (X, in case you were wondering, is xenop – a bird which apparently lives in tree holes. See, I did learn something). Oh, and it all rhymes, which is nice. But will it demand repeat retellings? Unless you’re nurturing a budding Attenborough or Oddy, I’d suggest not.

Next is Dog Biscuit by Oxford illustrator and writer Helen Cooper (Picture Corgi, £5.99), an inoffensive yet neutrally pleasing tale of a girl who eats a dog biscuit and, err…starts to take on canine tendencies. She then goes to bed, and dreams of becoming a real mutt. It’s silly, but the pictures, especially of the dream sequences, are really quite good.

It may warrant a handful of re-readings – if only for the cute artwork.

Taking the form of a cartoon strip, Traction Man meets Turbo Dog, by another Oxford artist, Mini Grey, (Red Fox, £5.99) is coming from a different place altogether. For a start, it appears to have been written, and illustrated while under the influence of industrial-strength psychedelic drugs.

It follows the adventures of an Action Man-type toy and a robot dog, who try to track down our hero’s beloved scrubbing brush/dog substitute which has been binned after spending too much time playing in the compost heap.

The references to “mystic shrooms” and trippy sequences exploring the sandpit and battling potato peel in the dustbin send big knowing winks to the grown-ups.

But the story is funny enough, and the busy artwork sufficently wacky and brash to appeal to young-uns. It shouldn’t work. But it kind of does. Just.