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Emily Gravett, whose debut, Wolves (Macmillan paperback£5.99), won the Greenaway Medal, produced two other books this year of remarkable originality and draughtsmanship. One, for very young children, is Orange Pear Apple Bear (Macmillan £6.99), which cleverly uses only five words, while skilled drawings of a friendly bear add meaning. The other, for 4-6s is Meerkat Mail (Macmillan £10.99), about a meerkat who visits his mongoose cousins around Africa, and sends (lift-the-flap) postcards home.
A book to sing along to - best with a party of children -is She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain by Jonathan Emmett (Egmont £10.99), which includes cards for sharing out the actions. We all remember the tune (in the book if not) and that “she’ll be wearing pink pyjamas”, but who knew that “They are flowery and frilly, / And they make her look quite silly” or that “she” is Bonnie Bandit? Deborah Allwright’s cartoony illustrations express the brio of the song. A surefire ice-breaker. Yee-hah.
For 3+, a soulful, minimal and finely produced little picturebook is Suzy Chic and Monique Touvray’s Watching (Winged Chariot Press £8), in which an endearing amoeboid creature with limbs is tempted to pluck a flower from a tree but waits to see the fruit, and plant it, and hear the new seedling say thank you. Watercolour panels, mostly in green and blue, celebrate patience, nature and simple pleasures.
For 3-6s the most stylish of picturebook introductions to science are Geoff Waring’s Oscar books, of which the latest are Oscar and the Cricket and Oscar and the Bat (Walker £7.99 each), about movement and sound respectively. Very small children will enjoy the characters and narrative, and think about rolling a ball or leaves falling from trees, about birdsong or the sound of rain. It is rare for books with facts to be so ravishing.
Award-winning cartoonist Chris Riddell’s latest picturebook, The Emperor of Absurdia (Macmillan £10.99), is a rococo carnival of comic monsters and surreal vegetation in which a big-eyed little boy of characteristic Riddell cuteness has adventures in a nonsensical dream-world. A surprise ending brings it all closer to home. One to be pored over.And every family needs a book of nursery rhymes. Axel Scheffler’s Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes and How She Came to Tell Them (Macmillan £14.99) embellishes 120 rhymes with comical characters in pinafores and knickerbockers whose expressions all look as though they are saying “oo-er”. Just the ticket.
5-9-year-olds
A simple idea makes a fascinating picturebook in Steve Jenkins's Actual Size (Frances Lincoln £9.99), in which the illustrations reproduce animals, or parts of them to scale. So, for instance, readers of 3+ can look into the eye of a giant squid, 30cm across, or test the size of their own hand against a gorilla’s. A huge fold-out accommodates a crocodile’s jaw. The textures of hide and fur are cunningly reproduced in collage.
A gem among novels for 7-9s this year was Sally Gardner’s Lucy Willow(Orion £8.99), about a girl with magically green fingers who lives in a train carriage and thwarts the thieving schemes of her duplicitous headmistress. The story involves a famous footballer and his vulgar pop-star bride, reminiscent of Posh and Becks, but its strength is astute comic writing.
Michael Rosen’s poems in Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy (Bloomsbury £12.99) have appeared in other anthologies but this handsome volume is partly reillustrated by Quen-tin Blake. It includes a CD in which Rosen imbues the slightest versification with humour, the vividness of a moment and often pathos.
Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook (Tradewind Books £17.95) is a winter warmer for the soul and stomach, with cosy retell-ings of tales from Brer Rabbit to Cinderella, each with a thematic (American) recipe, inviting participation by young sous-chefs, from breakfasts involving cream and a griddle to pumpkin tartlets. The tales have source notes for adults with a more academic interest. A handsome package with family appeal and naive illustrations of somewhat startling stridency.
Cornelia Funke’s When Santa Fell to Earth (Chicken House £9.99) is a quirky take on the Santa legend — he lives in a caravan with a couple of small frumpy angels, an invisible reindeer and a drawer full of rude elves. Funke is not as consistently well served by her translator here as she was by Anthea Bell in the Inkheart series but the originality travels, as does the antimaterialist message. Paul Howard’s cheerful drawings interpret the text admirably.
There is always a place for classics at Christmas, and The Hare and the Tortoise and Other Fables of La Fontaine (Barefoot Books £12.99) benefits from the skills of playwright Ranjit Bolt, who has translated the original verse tales into memorable and idiomatic rhyming couplets: “Do this, child, and your future life / Will have more joy in it than strife, / A lot less tears, with luck, than laughter, / And end up happy ever after.” Giselle Potter’s fitting illustrations owe something to folk art and embroidered tapestries.
But the most beautiful classic picturebook of the season is Angela Barrett’s Beauty and the Beast(Walker £12.99), retold (for 5-10s) with real wit and verve by Max Eilenberg, and given a Victorian setting. Barrett’s romantic and atmospheric pictures recall the preRaphaelites, chinoiserie and Arthur Rackham and have an exquisite miniaturist delicacy.
Two fine illustrators have responses to A Christmas Carol. One is PJ Lynch, whose beautifully produced edition (Walker £14.99) captures with phenomenal detail the story’s spookiness and glee, in masterly, muted water-colours. And Ruth Brown’s superbly observedThe Christmas Mouse(Andersen Press £5.99), for 6-10s, ingeniously foregrounds a Dickens-inspired moral tale of two mice (written by Toby Forward), while in the shadows the Dickens version unfolds. The colours, typically for Brown, are earthy, the draughtsmanship dazzling.
And any reader of 8-10 who is not acquainted with Clarice Bean should have the pleasure of catching up. Lauren Child’s latest, Don’t Look Now(Orchard £9.99), takes CB on a comic and poignant journey through her worst worries, including issues with friends, imparting useful wisdom.
9-to 11-year-olds
Recommending a book about punctuation as a Christmas gift for a child would be folly if the book were anything but Kate Petty and Jennie Maizel’sThe Perfect Pop-Up Punctuation Book (Bodley Head £9.99), which ingeniously squeezes all the possible fun (for 8-10s) out of commas and semicolons. It is an essential — but even so the giver had better know the child well. Mitchell Symons’s miscellany, How to Avoid a Wombat’s Bum (Doubleday £7.99), meanwhile offers hours of fun for anyone over 10 who loves trivia. Forays into teen-friendly popular culture leavens the erudition, while the whole inspires curiosity.
One of the most enjoyable debuts was Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon the Cutpurse (Simon & Schuster £12.99), about a boy who travels back (with a girl cousin) to a persuasively evoked 18th century, meets Dr Johnson, and finds in a former thief a more adequate parent than he left behind. This rich, atmospheric adventure is the first of a series, and will be a film. Catch it early. Dr Johnson also appears in another admirable debut, Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart (Hodder £10.99), in which London statues come to life and two unhappy children, befriended by the first world war Gunner from the Hyde Park Corner memorial, find themselves embroiled in a life-threatening battle that rages through the city while passers-by are oblivious.
Philip Reeve’s Hungry Cities quartet for readers of 10+, which came to a triumphant (if heartrending) conclusion this year with A Darkling Plain, evoked a distant future that resembled the past, with fantastical technology that suggested Victorian engineering. Reeve has reversed this in his novel for younger readers (9+), Larklight (Bloomsbury £12.99), a space adventure in which the Victorians explore the universe, thus making the past futuristic. A pair of siblings with 19th-century speech and manners meets dangers on the moon, Mars, Saturn and at the Great Exhibition. Again, Reeve sustains belief in his comprehensively imagined world.
12-plus
From its astonishing three-dimensional cover to its witty blurb (“Nature. History. Science. Whatever”), Pick Me Up: Stuff You Need to Know (Dorling Kinders-ley £19.99) is a design feat. It is an encyclopedia, but not as we know it. Using a different style for each page, and computer techniques such as links between articles, this is a strikingly elegant, imaginatively thought-out cornucopia of knowledge about all that stuff including society and politics, for techno-savvy teens.
There are plenty of novels for teenagers that are narrated in a tiresome, barely literate idiom offering little more than a dull imitation of their readers’ dreariest utterances. Occasionally, teen narratives do more. One instance is Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel Does My Head Look Big in This?(Scholastic £5.99), in which the Muslim narrator resolves to wear the hijab permanently as an assertion of her identity. It has humour, intelligence and sharp observation and deserves a wide readership. Another is Karen Karbo’s Minerva Clark Gets a Clue(Bloomsbury £5.99), a subversive infiltration into teen literature camouflaged as a breezy high-school mystery, but full of ideas that undermine shallow adolescent truisms. And it makes a kind of poetry of American youthspeak.
Mal Peet won the Carnegie Medal this year for Tamar, his outstanding novel about the Resistance in wartime Holland. His latest, The Penalty(Walker £6.99), about the disappearance of a teenage football star in Brazil, weaves together slavery in that country’s brutal colonial past, tribal magic and themes of modern-day corruption as a cynical football journalist goes in search of the boy. The book is notable for its exceptional humanity, stylistic clarity and neat construction.
And a few favourites already reviewed in these pages: Tim Bowler’s wintry thriller Frozen Fire (OUP £12.99), about an unhappy girl’s encounters with a mysterious boy, gets the award for the creepiest opening chapter; Linzi Glass’s compelling debut The Year the Gypsies Came (Puffin £10.99), a potent family drama set in South Africa under apartheid, has an ending to make you weep; and Michael Morpurgo’sAlone on a Wide, Wide Sea(Collins £12.99) marries present and past in a wide-reaching episodic saga about the forcible expatriation of orphan children to Australia, and a solo yacht voyage; typically for Morpurgo, it packs an emotional punch.
Top five
GIDEON THE CUTPURSE by Linda Buckley-Archer
Simon & Schuster £12.99 Age 8-12
Don’t miss this rich atmospheric time- travel story; the first of a series and set to be a film
LARKLIGHT by Philip Reeve
Bloomsbury £12.99 Age 9+
Inspired space adventure in which the Victorians explore the universe, making the past futuristic
MEERKAT MAIL by Emily Gravett
Macmillan £10.99 Age 4-7
Charming tale, with lift-the-flap postcards, about meerkat who visits his cousins in Africa
CLARICE BEAN, DON’T LOOK NOW by Lauren Child
Orchard £9.99 Age 8-10
Our heroine goes on a comic and poignant journey through her worst worries
THE YEAR THE GYPSIES CAME by Linzi Glass
Puffin £10.99 Age 13+
A powerful family drama set in apartheid South Africa with a box- of-tissues ending
Bestsellers
1 Candyfloss by Jacqueline Wilson (Doubleday) 165,994
2 Horrid Henry and the Football Fiend by Francesca Simon (Orion) 143,709
3 The End by Lemony Snicket (Egmont) 132,079
4 Doctor Who: The Official Annual (Penguin) 129,724
5 Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday) 103,921
Available at Books First prices (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
