Send your children to Rotten Island, or the Place Between, or Neverland for
Christmas. Let them sail on the Titanic, or battle climactic disaster, or
save the world from devastation. Their holidays will be the better for it.
There is comfort, too, in the following selection, but if you want high
adventure, you will find it here.
Babies always want to get in on the action of books, and There Are Cats in
This Book by Viviane Schwarz (Walker £9.99) is wonderfully interactive,
with flaps to lift and stuck-on pieces to feel. Witty and charming, it
strikes up a relationship between three playful felines and the reader, who
is invited to turn pages and blow a cat dry, with comic results.
The three colours (black, orange and white) and simple linocut images of an
unusual picturebook, The Haunted House by Kazuno Kohara (Macmillan
£10.99/£5.99), show that storytelling and style do not always need
tricksiness. Perfect for children scared by spooks, it is about a little
witch who makes ghosts into curtains and tablecloths.
David Lucas, one of this year's 10 Best New Illustrators, is a master of
decorative stylisation. With a quality reminiscent of William Morris and
Japanese prints, he uses luminous colours to depict a drama in a tree
involving a monkey called Peanut (Walker £10.99) - who comes with the book
as a little soft toy. Peanut is fearful and confused when night follows day,
but a reassuring friendship with a beetle brings a new dawn.
If I Were You, with rhyming text by Richard Hamilton (Bloomsbury
£10.99), is good for children who are old enough to empathise. It is about a
father and daughter who imagine swapping lives, and it will make children
laugh as Babette Cole's zany, scribbly pictures show the toddler pushing her
hairy-legged, pink-tutu-clad dad in a pushchair. After some lively
reflection on freedoms, treats and responsibilities, the daughter comes to
think that childhood is more fun.
Now in paperback, Olivia Helps with Christmas (Simon & Schuster
£6.99 ) has Olivia, who is the most stylish of pigs, even in a green-striped
romper suit, being more destructive than useful with the seasonal
preparations. Ian Falconer's illustrations are comical, minimalist and so
chic that the books are designer accessories.
Angela McAllister and Grahame Baker-Smith's stunning picturebook, Leon and
the Place Between (Templar £10.99), combines shadowy collage, painting,
photography and gilding to overwhelm readers with the power of magic. It's a
gorgeous, starsprinkled, read-on story for 3-6s, about a cynical boy who
goes to the circus and is converted.
Another Best New Illustrator is Polly Dunbar, who has illustrated, with
appropriate bounce and luminosity, Bubble Trouble (Frances Lincoln
£11.99), Margaret Mahy's awesomely alliterative, tongue-twisting verse about
a baby floating away in a bubble: “Little Mabel blew a bubble and it caused
a lot of trouble, / Such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobble way.”
Children already familiar with nursery rhymes will delight in The Great
Nursery Rhyme Disaster (Hodder £10.99) by David Conway, in which
characters from familiar rhymes get into the wrong ones. It follows the
increasingly chaotic progress of Little Miss Muffet, with her cute,
geometric face, through gorgeous pages filled (by Melanie Williamson) with
colour, action, incident and pattern.
William Steig's Rotten Island (National Maritime Museum £9.99), first
published in 1969, is a riot of psychedelic monsters, who fight to the death
until they leave their “rotten, horrible” island, full of earthquakes,
tornados and volcanoes, to the flowers and a rainbow. For 4-7s.
One of the joys of Clara Vulliamy's collectable series about 10 tiny mice is
the mascot in a matchbox in the back of each volume. These sparkly, pretty
books also delight in all things miniature, offer reassurance and encourage
creativity. Lucky Wish Mouse: White Christmas (Orchard £7.99)
tells of a little lost mouse brought home safe, and carries a feel-good
Christmas message.
The heroine of Maisie Moo and Invisible Lucy by Chris McKimmie (Allen &
Unwin £10.99) lives in the Gone Bonkers Discount Store in an Australian town
called Venice. Maisie is her parents' “little angel”, but doesn't want to
be. So her invisible friend Lucy is the naughty one. Drawn with exuberance,
and humorously written in a child's voice and writing, it seems simple but
adds up to a great deal. The quirkiest picturebook of the year.
The winner of the 7-14 category of the first Roald Dahl Funny prize, Mr Gum
and the Dancing Bear (Egmont £5.99), is written like a stand-up
monologue by Andy Stanton and illustrated by David Tazzyman, and is a
perfect stocking filler to keep children chortling. In this fifth Mr Gum
story, kindly nine-year-old Polly befriends a bear who is so sad that he
moults. When he is kidnapped, Polly sails to the Kingdom of the Beasts where
her old enemy Mr Gum smiles “like a haunted shipwreck” and the Spirit of the
Rainbow and a fat man in a balloon effect a rescue. Yes, well, the plot is
not really the point.
The Bloomsbury Christmas Treasury (£12.99) by Sally Grindley is a
collection of gentle, traditional stories about the meaning of Christmas,
with illustrations by artists from Ian Beck to Michael Foreman. It includes
a retelling of the Nativity, and tales about a Christmas fairy who learns
not to envy others, and an elf rewarded for his altruism and thrift.
One of the touching anthologies of the year was Reinhardt Jung's Bambert's
Book of Missing Stories (Egmont £9.99), in which philosophical
narratives about life, death and hope in diverse times and places, from
Venetian palaces to war zones, turn reality into fairy tales, and are
connected by a poignant linking story of a lonely little man who reaches out
for friendship through his writing. Emma Chichester Clark's pictures make
this handsome volume a thing of visual as well as verbal beauty.
Emily Diamand's Reavers' Ransom (Chicken House £6.99) is a notable
debut set in a post- apocalyptic future that resembles the Middle Ages,
except that the young girl narrator, setting out to rescue fellow villagers
from kidnap by dangerous raiders, is equipped with treasure from the past
that turns out to be a talking computer. An inventive adventure, full of the
unexpected.
A word for a favourite debut of the year: Ingrid Law's Savvy (Puffin
£5.99) is a funny, feel-good story about a family who acquire special (and
unlikely) powers when they reach the age of 13. It is Garrison Keillor
crossed with Sharon Creech, and takes place largely on an eventful bus
journey.
At a time when too many role models for girls are celebrity bimbos, Girls
Are Best by Sandi Toksvig (Doubleday £7.99) is the book to buy for
daughters to remind them what feminism is all about. It would make a fine
stocking filler with its lively, entertaining, illustrated snippets about
the great women in history and the restrictions that they overcame, and will
arm readers for arguments about gender equality.
Cornelia Funke's Inkworld trilogy, in which fiction leaks into reality, came
to a happy conclusion this year, despite the ominous title of Inkdeath
(Chicken House £12.99), with a tale of heroism and sacrifice, of rivalry in
love, and the quest to bring Dustfinger back to life. A hymn to the joy of
reading.
The tale of a bellboy at the Savoy who ends up on the Titanic is Michael
Morpurgo's latest window onto history in Kaspar: Prince of Cats
(HarperCollins £12.99). The book is enhanced by Michael Foreman's fine
illustrations, which evoke pre-first-world-war decor, dress and street
scenes.
And for readers of 10+ who like action: Charlie Higson's By Royal Command
(Puffin £12.99), the fifth and most sophisticated of his Young Bond books,
brings 14-year-old James to a new level of maturity in a dangerous world,
and explains the mysterious “maid incident” that causes him to leave Eton.
Published last Thursday, too late for review here, is JK Rowling's The
Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of stories purporting to be the
storybook mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with notes by
Albus Dumbledore (and Rowling's own illustrations). A handwritten,
morocco-bound, silver-encrusted copy (one of seven, the others were given to
private owners) was auctioned for charity in 2007 and sold for £1.95m.
Profits from the published book, in the standard and collectors' editions
(Bloomsbury £6.99/£50), will go to Rowling's charity, The Children's High
Level Group, to improve the welfare of children in residential institutions.
A book that distinguished itself by winning big prizes this year is Patrick
Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (Walker £7.99), a fat,
sophisticated, complex first novel with a narrator hero on the run whose
voice is somewhere between Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. It is a fantasy
of a town in which there are no women, and men constantly hear the din of
each other's thoughts.
Saci Lloyd's Costa-shortlisted The Carbon Diaries 2015 (Hodder £6.99)
combines a smart but chatty first-person teenage diary with a vision of a
frightening near-future in which the fuel crisis and global warming have led
to carbon rationing. Heroine Laura grumbles, jokes and worries her way
through big issues such as how to stop a climactic apocalypse and whether
she will get to snog Ravi, the gorgeous boy next door.
Fans of Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses sequence won't want to miss the
bonus of a fourth novel in what was originally planned as a trilogy. In Double
Cross (Doubleday £12.99), Callie Rose's boyfriend is manipulated into
drug dealing, while she wrestles with her guilt about the death of her
grandmother. The book is written in Blackman's accessible demotic, with her
flair for colloquial dialogue, for shocks and twists, and for conveying
powerful teenage emotions.
Also strong, thought-provoking stuff, mitigated by laughter and warmth, is Jackdaw
Summer by David Almond (Hodder £10.99), about a Geordie boy who finds an
abandoned baby and learns about the human capacity both for love and
violence. Almond's writing is like the perfect outfit - it may look casual,
but everything fits just right.
Finally, to the fourth volume of Anthony Horowitz's bestselling The Power of
Five sequence, Necropolis (Walker £12.99), which has a female
protagonist, Scarlet, who is the last of the five Gatekeepers - 15-year-olds
who live both now and 10,000 years ago and have to save the world again from
the evil Old Ones. Darker than Horowitz's Alex Rider stories, this is a
thrilling race against time.
