TROLLS ON HOLS (6+) by Alan MacDonald

BAD BLOOD (13+) by Rhiannon Lassiter

IF THE JOYS OF family holidays are wearing thin; if gloom – as well as the rotten weather – is descending, cheer yourself up with two new books.

The first, for younger children, is part of Alan MacDonald’s Troll Trouble series – one of those rumbustious tales in which an ordinary family is lumbered with an eccentric extra. An early version of this was Michael Bond’s beloved Paddington Bear series, and many others, from Jacqueline Wilson’s Werepuppy to Jeremy Strong’s There’s a Viking in My Bed, have followed. But none has hit my funny bone quite as hard as MacDonald’s latest, Trolls on Hols.

The prissy, if polite, Priddle family is being driven mad by their neighbours, the Trolls. Gross, uncouth, dirty and affectionate, Mr and Mrs Troll are perfectly happy at home in Biddlesden, but their son Ulrik has other ideas, now the holidays are here. When the Priddles buy a carvan to enjoy “sunny Wales” on the cheap, little do they realise that the Troll family has stowed away too. But Boggy Moor, near Paradise Park, has a Beast, and it’s just as well there are two boys to tackle it . . .

Essentially a comedy about class, Trolls on Hols has the same queasy hilarity as television programmes such as Wife Swap. The lumpen Trolls are nicer than the mean-spirited Priddles, and fail to understand how much the latter loathe them. This is the type of light-hearted, well-plotted book that is often overlooked in the surge of summer titles, but is perfect for readers who hoot at Fungus the Bogeyman and who will one day discover P. G. Wodehouse. The drawings by Mark Beech share the scratchy, irreverent laughter.

Rhiannon Lassiter’s Bad Blood is a much more Gothic tale of family horror. Four stepbrothers and sisters are yoked together when their respective parents remarry. Kat and Cat hate each other for sharing the same name. The resulting “war zone” is made worse when they go on holiday to a house in the Lake District that turns out to be haunted by an unpleasant family curse.

Bitchy Cat discovers a boxful of “naked, faceless, hairless dolls”, plus an exquisite one called Delilah, that become increasingly menacing. The more bookish Kat has found a collection of children’s classics in which the name of every character who comforts or helps the heroine has been scribbled out. The “house of horrors” also extends to another even more vulnerable girl, and a mysterious, attractive teenager called Fox.

Lassiter is the daughter of the wonderful author Mary Hoffman, and is a young writer to look out for. Her descriptions of a family at war with itself reminded me strongly of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, and are genuinely scary. Claustrophobia and bewilderment seeps through the pages of this highly charged thriller, although it is strongest when it moves away from the supernatural towards realism.

What I especially liked, though, was not only its affectionate, exasperated portrait of neurotic teenage girls, but the overlooked, kind-hearted boys who plod quietly along and save the day. They are the ones who most need family harmony, and who all too often fail to find it except in fiction.

Trolls on Hols by Alan MacDonald

Bloomsbury, £4.99; 128pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £4.74 (free p&p)

Bad Blood by Rhiannon Lassiter

Oxford, £5.99; 336pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £5.69 (free p&p)

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