2-6
THE ROARING, HOOTING, monster success of the season is Tyrannosaurus Drip
(Macmillan, £10.99/offer £9.90), Julia Donaldson’s tale about a little
dinosaur that hatches into the wrong family.
Drip is a peaceful, veggie-loving child whose mother drops him into a T. Rex
nest. How he escapes to find his rightful tribe is told in the same joyous
rhyming couplets as the author’s Gruffalo tales.
After this, Mega-Beasts by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart (Walker,
£19.99/ £17.99) may seem less appealing but it’s a brilliant pop-up book,
with a lively text. The highly-coloured monsters lunge, plunge, fight and
take flight and although the BBC’s Walking With Beasts will give you
more peace, junior boffins will have hours of fun as the sabre-toothed tiger
and mammoth take pride of place.
OUP has reissued A Picture History of Britain by Clarke Hutton
(£9.99/£9), a feast of postwar nostalgia, with vivid vignettes and elegant
illustration, but the loveliest summer book of all is King Ocean’s Flute (Orion,
£10.99/£9.90), Lucy Coats’s fairytale about a boy musician who outplays the
King of the Sea. Peter Malone’s shimmering pictures of land and sea
creatures make it ideal for the seaside.
So, too, is Emma Chichester Clark’s Melrose and Croc Beside the Sea
(HarperCollins, £5.99/£5.69), in which the best friends prepare for the
beach. The lyrical, ice-cream colours and simple story capture a child’s
happiness, just as Rose Impey and Chris Mould’s hysterically funny rendition
of One Man Went to Mow(Hodder, £10.99/£9.90) describes a child’s
determined naughtiness when a dog buries too many things in a field.
Dorling Kindersley’s Buzz (£14.99/£13.50) is spot-on for budding
naturalists, asking them to “match the parent to the child” with pictures of
larvae and grubs, looking inside a locust, or an army of ants. Phobics might
fall in love with Emily Gravett’s Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears
(Macmillan, £10.99/£9.90), which is funny, wise and exquisitely illustrated.
Expect to reread before bedtime a hundred nights in a row.
6-10
Heather Dyer’s The Boy in the Biscuit Tin (Chicken House,
£4.99/£4.75), enlivened by Peter Bailey’s drawings, is a charming caper in
which three children discover a box of magic tricks that really work. Barnaby
Grimes: The Curse of the Nightwolf (Doubleday, £8.99/£8.10), illustrated
by Chris Riddell, is another elegant, Gothic thriller by Paul Stewart about
a “tick-tock boy” who jumps from roof to roof. It has everything from swords
to werewolves. More zany humour infects Angie Sage’s Physik (Bloomsbury,
£12.99/£11.70), the continuing adventures of that other boy wizard, Septimus
Heap, this time battling with an evil queen. My favourite adventure for
younger readers is the new Joshua Doder, Grk: Operation Tortoise (Andersen,
£4.99/£4.75). His hero Tim is on holiday in the Seychelles and a boy and his
dog are all that can prevent the extinction of a species. The humour,
narrative voice and absence of magic stuff are a delight.
Slightly older children will also love Will Gatti’s update of the Scarlet
Pimpernel story, The Geek, the Greek and the Pimpernel (Orchard,
£5.99/ £5.69), in which two clever kids and a subversive third one take on
school bullies and an appalling headmaster. Ingenious, exciting and perfect
for facing up to the end of the holidays.
8-11
Carole Wilkinson’s Dragon-keeper: Garden of the Purple Dragon (Macmillan,
£8.99/ £8.10) continues the adventures of Ping, the last dragon-keeper. It
is tender, funny and exciting, as she struggles to protect a baby dragon
from a greedy sorcerer. A must for imaginative children aged over 8.
So, too is Sally Prue’s The Truth Sayer (OUP, £5.99/ £5.69), a
thought-provoking, Pullmanesque adventure set in two worlds, our own and a
priestly dictatorship that is bent on suppressing magic.
Elizabeth Laird’s Crusade (Macmillan, £10.99/£9.90), sees the
battle of Acre through the eyes of Adam, who is attempting to atone for his
mother who died without making a confession, death, and Salim, the Muslim
apprentice to a Jewish doctor. Seriously good and sympathetic.
For girls, Alice Hoffman’s Incantation (Egmont, £5.99/ £5.69), a
novel about the persecution of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, is
heartbreaking in its description of friendship tested through tragedy. Older
readers should look out for Marcus Sedgwick’s masterly account of the
Russian Revolution, seen through the fictionalised eyes of the author Arthur
Ransome in Blood Red, Snow White (Orion, £9.99/ £9), a doomed love
story of power and passion.
11-14+
Too many film sequels disappoint, but children’s book sequels go from strength
to strength. Top of my list is the fourth in Joseph Delaney’s Wardstone
Chronicles, The Spook’s Battle (Bodley Head, £9.99/£9). From
the opening, when the hero Tom tells how he is chased by a witch to the
chilling climax when he is hunted by the Devil, who has been raised by the
witches of Pendle, this is an outstandingly imaginative, well-written
thriller.
Darren Shan continues his gruesome Demonata series on top form in Blood
Beast (HarperCollins, £12.99/£11.70). Grubbs Grady discovers more about
his family curse on a nightmare ride to Hell. Children of 12+ should lap it
up.
Also for 12+, Matt Haig’s Shadow Forest(Bodley Head, £9.99/£9),
weaves horror and humour into a terrific tale about an orphaned brother and
sister who go to live with an unprepossessing aunt on the edge of a
sinister, troll-infested forest.
There are more siblings looking out for each other in the latest of Anthony
Horowitz’s Power of Five series, Nightrise (Walker,
£6.99/£6.65), which is even longer, twistier and more hair-raising than
before. A psychic twin is kidnapped, leaving his weaker sibling to trace him
to prison and prevent a presidential assassination.
Institutional cruelty is a strong feature of Ally Kennen’s Berserk
(Marian Lloyd, £6.99/£6.65), a horribly funny thriller about a boy with a
bad best friend – and a psychotic penfriend released from Death Row.
Conspiracy by adults against children is the theme of Steve Voake’s The
Starlight Conspiracy (Faber, £12.99/£11.70), in which a traveller girl
is given a mysterious bracelet made by aliens. It endows her with magical
powers, and sets some murderous men on her trail as she is chased from
Glastonbury to America in a thoroughly enjoyable adventure for devotees of Doctor
Who. There is more to summer than Harry Potter. Try these, and see.
Audiobooks
THE FASHION FOR fantastical trilogies is providing some first-rate audiobooks.
For younger listeners, Dugald A. Steer’s The Dragon’s Eye(Orion,
CDs, £12.99/offer £13.29) is the first instalment of the Dragonology
Chronicles,which adds narrative adventures to Dragonology, Steer’s hugely
popular encyclopaedia of dragon lore. The narrator, Dan Stevens, reads with
such conviction and spirit that he makes it almost believable.
Older children will relish The Golem’s Eye (Random House,
unabridged, CDs, £18.99/£18.19), the second part of Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus
Trilogy. Read, as was The Amulet of Samarkand, by Stephen Pacey, it finds
our hero Nathaniel becoming increasingly unpleasant as he enters the corrupt
world of politics (cue some neat satire on the Blair government style).
Classic children’s stories offer listening that parents will enjoy too.
Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Stories (Naxos, CDs, £13.99/£13.29)
are made quite irresistible thanks to Geoffrey Palmer’s rendition of How
the Whale Got his Throat, thanks to a Mariner “of infinite resource and
sagacity”, How the Elephant got his Trunkthrough the Elephant Child’s
“satiable curiosity” and all the rest.
Finally, Gabriel Woolf’s excellent abridgements of Arthur Ransome’s 12 books
are being issued on CD and cassette. The latest is Great Northern?
(CDs, £13.50 from www.swallows-and-amazons.com).
Buy
the books here
Celebrity Choice: Francesca Simon, Horrid Henry author
A WRINKLE IN TIME, by Madeleine L’Engle is an American
classic that is, bizarrely, almost unknown here. One of my all-time
favourites, it’s about Meg, a clever, weird, lonely girl, who goes on a
quest across space to find her missing father, with her “faults” to help
her. Francesca Simon’s A Hat Trick of Horrid Henry will be published
by Orion on July 5 at £8.99
Reader choice: I shall be reading THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN by J.
R. R. Tolkien. I am escaping to Middle-earth to lose myself in a world
of fantasy. Jean Marshall, Bushey, Herts
