It’s a great summer for fantasy, from pre-schoolers conjuring up animal chums
to young adults entranced by ancient magic. There is also plenty of laughter
in this selection of holiday reading for all ages.
Under 6s
Katie Cleminson is a notable new talent in children’s picture books, judging
by her debut, Box of Tricks (Cape £10.99). Given a big box for her
birthday, Eva magics things out of it, including a polar bear called Monty
and lots of rabbits, and has a party. Cleminson draws friendly creatures
with a free, confident inky line against a background of dribbled blots, and
tells a simple story of few words, but with surprises.
In Milo Armadillo by Jan Fearnley (Walker £10.99), endpapers that look
knitted set the tone of a cosy story of a home-made toy who is not the pink
fluffy bunny Tallulah originally wanted, but turns out to be the perfect
companion, with a gift for the saxophone and friendship. A celebration of
imagination, with comic and touching drawings and fabric collage that adds
to the warmth, this is a book to snuggle up with. A website link offers a
pattern for knitting your own Milo.
The charm of The Girl with the Bird’s-Nest Hair by Sarah Dyer
(Bloomsbury £5.99) lies in its naive illustrations of the supermarket, the
park, the farm and Hollie, who doesn’t like to have her hair brushed. The
childlike pictures have muted colours, pretty use of collage, interesting
details and an airy sense of design. The rhyming text, disappointingly,
doesn’t scan, though it tells an entertaining story of avian infestation
that only gets out of hand — cue children’s laughter — when turkeys and a
peacock join in.
There are two kinds of (grand)parenting in Martin Waddell’s Captain
Small Pig (Andersen Press £10.99), in which a piglet is taken out rowing
on a lake. One, exemplified by Turkey, is nagging and restrictive: “You are
too small to row!” The other, exemplified by Old Goat, is kindly,
imaginative and permissive: “Of course you can row!” Turkey gets a
comeuppance, which Small Pig sleeps through, but there is a knowing
satisfaction in this book for the child reader, a salutary reminder about
how to treat children for the adult, and summery drawings by Susan Varley,
expressing emotions succinctly, for the delight of both.
Simple early readers, or first chapter books to read aloud that offer
substantial entertainment, are often hard to find. A few suggestions: a new
series aimed at 6- to 8-year-olds from Simon Bartram begins with The
Disappearing Moon (Templar £4.99) about Bob the Man in the Moon and his
six-legged dog, Barry. A Wallace and Gromit-like pair, they worry about
putting out the bins while saving the moon from a dastardly magician who has
made it disappear, and celebrate their success with beef-paste sandwiches.
Rebecca Lisle injects real humour into her stories of three brothers, Joe,
Laurie and Theo and their dog Clinky Monkey, who, in the latest, The Gnome
with the Knobbly Knees (Andersen Press £4.99), foil their neighbour Mr
Gribble’s Great Gnome Robbery. And in her latest collection of stories from
around the world, The Ogress and the Snake and Other Stories from Somalia
(Frances Lincoln £5.99), Elizabeth Laird finds a happy part of Somali
history in their magical desert tales.
7- TO 11-year-olds
A contender for great openings of the year is Caro King’s debut, Seven
Sorcerers (Quercus £9.99), which begins: “Nin had never liked
Wednesdays, but this one took the biscuit. On this Wednesday she woke up to
find that it was raining buckets and that her little brother had ceased to
exist.” Nin, finding her brother’s room empty of him and his belongings,
asks “Mum, is Toby OK?” Her mother replies “Who?” This chilling start leads
to a quest through a parallel universe, the Drift, and causes Nin and her
allies to seek Toby in the terrible House of Strood. The Drift is made out
of our fears and desires, and King understands both well enough to make this
fantasy truly moving and involving.
Handsomely reprinted, for children (of 7-9) who can spell well, is James
Thurber’s 1957 story The Wonderful O (NYRB £9.99), about
a tyrannical pirate who bans everything on an island that contains the
letter O — because his mother was once stuck in a porthole, with tragic
consequences. Full of word lists and wordplay, with charming illustrations
by Marc Simont, it is a verbally ambitious little classic for logophiles.
Or, as the pirate would have it, lgphiles.
Scriptwriter and actor Emma Kennedy’s comic novel for children of 9+, Wilma
Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts (Macmilan £5.99) begins
with an improbable bit of cartoon slapstick — the heroine has flown up
through the air after slipping on a banana skin — but the rest, though still
zany, is witty and sharp as well as really good fun. Wilma is a determined
orphan who wants to be a detective. Sent from a grim orphanage to work for
an awful old bat, where her duties include cleaning the bogeys from her
mistress’s nostrils, Wilma meets her hero, an acclaimed detective, and
bothers him irritatingly until she and her beagle, Pickle, earn their way to
being sidekicks.
FE Higgins’s three parallel gothic novels, set in a world that is magical and
historical, suggesting the 18th century, have not yet achieved the
readership they deserve, despite critical enthusiasm. The latest, The
Eyeball Collector (Macmillan £8.99), for nine-year-olds and above,
follows young Hector Fitzbaudly as he pursues the duplicitous one-eyed
villain who brought about the destruction of his father. It takes Hector
into a house of grotesqueries with a sadistic chatelaine, where he learns a
lesson about revenge. Atmospheric, suspenseful and cleverly written with a
love of unusual words (“gibbous”, “crepitate”), it is not for the
faint-hearted.
Paul Adam, an established author of thrillers for adults, has written his
first children’s book (for 10-14s), Escape from Shadow Island (Corgi £5.99),
which introduces 14-year-old schoolboy and escapologist Max Cassidy, the
“Half-Pint Houdini”, who sets out to prove that his father is not dead, and
that his imprisoned mother did not murder him. With a noirish plot and
somewhat stereotypical Latin American villains, it is written in clear,
punchy prose and displays Adam’s talent for tension. It is somewhere that
Charlie Higson fans might go next.
12+
Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by “Queen of Teen” Louise
Rennison (HarperCollins £10.99) is the final fab and groovy volume of the
confessions of 15-year-old Georgia Nicolson, and answers the question we
have been getting quite jelloid about for 10 books: will she get together
with Dave the Laugh who is her soulmate, as everyone but Georgia recognises?
En route to the answer we relish the perils of Bum-ty the persecuted budgie,
and rehearsals for a school production of “Rom and Jule” that are full of
hilariosity. Either these books make you chortle like a loon in loon pants
or you live on another planet.
Dawn, the 15-year-old narrator of Kevin Brooks’s Killing God (Puffin
£6.99) has it in for God. Her father found Him and then the worst happened.
Brooks takes this thriller, which slowly reveals its secrets, beyond taboos
to ask profound questions about forgiveness, and shows how menacing girls
can be when they fake friendship for ulterior motives. A daring and
extraordinary book.
Patrick Ness’s much-garlanded young-adult debut The Knife of Never
Letting Go, about a world in which the thoughts of men and animals, but
not of women, are audible, ended on a cliffhanger that will make his fans
snatch at the sequel, The Ask and the Answer (Walker £12.99). It plunges the
central characters, Todd and Viola, into immediate peril and suspense.
Caught up on two sides of warring factions in a dystopian dictatorship ruled
by a terrifying, manipulative tyrant, the youngsters face moral choices that
threaten their lives, their values and their relationship. Ness is both
accessible and sophisticated, handling big subjects — terrorism, feminism,
genocide, love — in prose that is simple and heart-stopping. A fat book
likely to be devoured at one sitting.
Ness’s first book was shortlisted for this year’s Carnegie Medal, whose
winner, Siobhan Dowd’s Bog Child (Definitions £6.99), was
announced last week. The seven books on the exceptional shortlist, all with
male protagonists, are now out in paperback, and a summer of reading them
all would be a summer well spent. The following are the two that have not
already been mentioned in these pages. Eoin Colfer’s Airman (Puffin
£6.99, for 9 to teens), set on an imaginary island off the coast of Ireland
in the late 19th century, has a swashbuckling scientist hero, Conor, who
dreams of flying machines. Full of nailbiting drama, including betrayals,
battles, prison escapes and getting the girl, this is a skilfully told,
emotionally involving adventure rich in historical detail. And for 14+, Kate
Thompson’s Creature of the Night (Red Fox £6.99) concerns a
disaffected, car-stealing youth taken away from the influence of his Dublin
gang by his otherwise irresponsible mother to a rural cottage, from which he
intends only to escape. But Bobby changes under the influence of other
people’s decency, in a tale that interweaves contemporary teenage experience
— strong language, bad habits and all — with Irish folklore and a murder
mystery.
