WILLIAM TELL
by Leonard Everett Fisher & illustrated by Leonard Everett Fisher
William Tell ($16.00; March 22, 1996; 32 pp.; 0-374-38436-3): The cool gaze of a boy on this book's jacket startles; he has an apple on his head and is posed against a thick tree trunk. From the first, Fisher (Gandhi, 1995, etc.) pulls readers into the legend of William Tell, the man who aimed an arrow at that apple (and his son) rather than kneel before the hat of an Austrian tyrant. Exquisite paintings of a mountain village, a close shot of the arrow in flight, the apple cut cleanly in half: If the story weren't already legendary, Fisher's work would make it so. (Picture book. 5-8)