Want to while away a few lazy summer hours? Pour your kids a cool glass of lemonade and share a few of these books.

Independence Day calls for a stirring rendition of You’re a Grand Old Flag (Walker, 2007, ages 4 and up, $16.95). Acclaimed illustrator Warren Kimble has envisioned a folk-art look to the lyrics written by George Cohan in 1906. Kimble often paints on 18^th century wood to give his work a weathered appearance, with antique doors, breadboards and tabletops being his canvases of choice. These paintings of American flags, a star-spangled rooster and, of course, apple pie, give an appealing, old-fashioned air to this ever-popular song. Author’s notes in the back provide facts sure to intrigue. For example, the flag’s colors symbolize certain traits. The red stands for valor, the white for purity and the blue for perseverance and justice.

Summer shuts down a small town for a week in Heat Wave (Harcourt, 2007, ages 2 to 7, $16). Kids and their parents will love the old-timey look and feel of this book about coping in the days before air-conditioning. In an engaging storytelling voice, author Eileen Spinelli reports daily on the small cast of fast-wilting characters rendered in watercolor by illustrator Betsy Lewin. On Monday, the Blue children open a lemonade stand, but by Wednesday they have resorted to selling only ice. The local policeman, Officer McGinnis, soaks in a cool tub; Lottie Mim takes a nap with "cold tea bags on her eyes," and a dog named Wags droops by the screen door. By Saturday, the heat-beaten characters decide to sleep by the river in hopes of a cooling breeze. And just when the young reader can’t take the heat any longer, Spinelli gives every snoozing character "the exact same dream" — a dream of the rain that arrives while they sleep.

An electrician by day, Steve emerges from the basement storage room every week in summer as the scuba-masked figure known as The Dumpster Diver (Candlewick, 2007, ages 3 to 7, $16.99). Author Janet Wong chronicles Steve’s adventures from the point of view of a neighboring kid who likes to help him. The young narrator and his friends gleefully note all the "beetles and roaches and spiders" that splash out when Steve (literally) dives into a laden garbage bin. But the treasures he brings up — busted skis, broken chairs, old umbrellas — are worth all the bugs and stink, the kids agree, since this so-called useless stuff can be fashioned into all matter of amazing things. Illustrations by David Roberts brim with bright colors, wacky inventions and all sorts of creepy crawlies — and a special gizmo created by the kids for Steve.

Author/artist David Frampton weaves a story around a lively American poem, A Coney Island of the Mind, and honors its creator Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Mr. Ferlinghetti’s Poem (Eerdmans, 2006, ages 2 to 7, $18). The poem, as quoted in the text, recalls "one hot day" in Brooklyn when the "firemen turned on their hoses" for a young boy who relishes the "water squirting up to the sky." The boy (who is also the poet) is bemused at the end when the firemen turn off the hose and start "playing pinochle again just as if nothing had ever happened," since the moment had seemed so magical to him. Frampton’s woodcuts, with their bold, black lines, convey the high energy of the urban scene and capture the life-affirming power both of water and the imagination.

A classic tale ripe with humor and mystery is Lucy Nolan’s The Lizard Man of Crabtree County (Marshall Cavendish, 1999, ages 4 and up, $15.95). In a place where "exciting things don’t happen very often," young James Arthur, with the help of his beagle, Moondog, decides to dress up like a shrub to see if he can make something happen. Despite his desire to entice a bird to land on his head, James Arthur ends up only with a bunch of leaf-loving bugs in his underwear. Heading home in disappointment, though, James Arthur unwittingly unleashes a chain of odd events. An elderly neighbor spots a big green Lizard Man! Another hears its chilling howl! Though James Arthur and Moondog search eagerly for the Lizard Man over the next few days, the creature remains maddeningly elusive. Young readers will get a kick out of unraveling the mystery with clues contained in Jill Kastner’s illustrations. They reveal the Lizard Man to be none other than James Arthur himself, bumbling about in search of what everyone else is talking about.

Maryland author Laura Bowers makes her debut with a wise and funny novel that is perfect for a summer read. In Beauty Shop for Rent (Harcourt, 2007, ages 12 and up, $17), Abbey Garner plans a life very different from that of her scatterbrained mother, who was pregnant at 16, bartends for a living and has dumped Abbey at her great-grandmother’s house before moving to yet another new town. A self-described "financial genius," Abbey decides to pull her own life together. She begins working at her great-grandmother’s beauty shop and saving her money. And along the way to independence and wealth, Abbey finds something else for which she has been yearning — support and friendship with the elderly ladies who hang out at the shop. Each character emerges as a distinct personality, but it is Abbey, with her fierce and sassy voice, whom readers will take to their hearts and cheer when she finally confronts her mother. The book has a strong sense of place, which local readers will recognize immediately as the state of Maryland. Well-drawn details include Ocean City during Senior Week, the Frederick Keys minor-league baseball team and a University of Maryland Terrapins sweatshirt.

Poet Ruth Forman pens a paean to city summers in Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon (Children’s Book Press, 2007, ages 3 to 8, $16.95). The young narrator doesn’t long for a backyard or butterflies but celebrates the "black magic n brownstone steps," the "double dutch n freeze tag n kickball," the "corner store" and "red cream pop" that enliven her urban neighborhood. Illustrator Cbabi Bayoc brings verve and rich color to the jazzy poem, with vivid portraits of the "fine brothers" and "fine sistas" the narrator encounters on summer evenings. The energetic spirit of art and text is sure to inspire some step-sitting and moon-calling this summer — and perhaps some poem-making, too.