You mean that you would like to draw scenes from that story, but not an image for every exchange of words etc.?
I guess there are several different possibilities which you might want to consider, depending on the ratio between text and picture. One possibility has been suggested elsewhere already, namely a comic, but in Prince Valiant (Prinz Eisenherz) style, that is images, but short accompanying text rather than text bubbles. That way entire dialogues can be fitted into one image (if necessary) where a text bubble comic would require multiple pictures.
Another alternative would be something like you mentioned, the "Children's Book way" (a term that refers to the style only, not to the content I suppose) where you could just add the text to an image and where there doesn't necessarily have to be at least an image per scene (which I guess would be more of a requirement in the Prince Valiant style comic).
Maybe you could also try something new; a mixture between comic and book. There could be long passages of text about scenes which you don't fancy to draw, but they could fill the gaps between those scenes which you would really like to draw. I haven't seen something like that before, so I can't say anything about how it would work out. But this doesn't necessarily mean it would work out bad.
