0- to 4-years
Wild eccentricity and joie de vivre characterise The Hair Scare by Jeffrey Fisher (Bloomsbury £10.99), in which young Radbert’s tonsorial topiary starts a craze, until the king, dissatisfied with his barnet, bans hairdressing. All ends well with Radbert’s revenge and the departure on the wings of his own hairdo of a king too fond of banning things. Madcap, distinctive and funny, with quirky cartoons, it adds up, as the jacket says, to a celebration of “mankind’s inherent goodness”.
More traditional is the tale of Henny Penny with its satisfying rhymes, repetitions and accumulating lists, although it has been given a happy ending in Vivian French’s deft, light-hearted and nostalgic retelling (Bloomsbury £10.99), with vibrant autumnal illustrations by Sophie Windham of open country and cottage kitchens.
A book for young children who are taking the Channel ferry this summer is The Cat Who Wanted to Go Home by Jill Tomlinson (Egmont £10.99), about a French kitten who is accidentally transported to England in a hot-air balloon and tries all sorts of ways to get back. The book’s greatest strengths are Paul Howard’s tenderly observed vignettes and pastels of the cat, characters, interiors and seascapes.
With its striking collage, peep-through pages, wit and sound ecological message about greed, pollution and over-fishing, Ben Galbraith’s The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Hodder £11.99) is a handsome action adventure for 4-7s in which a minke whale takes on three villainous despoilers of the sea and their big machinery.
5- to 8-years
Mini Grey’s The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon (Cape £10.99) is a sophisticated take on the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle. It is full of satirical references to gangster films, 1940s musicals and silent movies, as the dish and the spoon run away to live the high life in America, fall on hard times, turn to crime, do time, find each other again and live happily ever after. Pages are divided into successive scenes, and the clever detail, period feel and visual jokes make this one of the picturebooks of the year.
Up there with it is Meerkat Mail (Macmillan £10.99, published August 4) by Emily Gravett. Sunny the meerkat from the Kalahari desert tours Africa visiting his mongoose cousins and sends lift-the-flap postcards home. Expertly drawn, comical, zoologically informative and starring one of the world’s most endearing animals, this is essential for every suitcase or library.
Publishers, identifying a gap in the market for emerging readers of 4-7, are on a drive to fill it: initiatives come, among others, from The Chicken House (with cute but stroppy Junie B Jones), Simon & Schuster (with the stroppy and not so cute Pirate Princess), Catnip (with its undoubtedly cute Fairy Charm books), Walker Books (with its stylish Walker Stories), and Happy Cat Books with their simple First Readers. For more confident readers, among the best are Karen Wallace’s The Crunchbone Castle Chronicles, including the funny Prince Marvin’s Great Moment (A & C Black £4.99), about a weedy prince with arms like “bits of wet string”; Rebecca Lisle’s mystery, The Dog in the Diamond Collar (Andersen Press £4.99), a proper story, entertainingly observed; and Sally Gardner’s touching, original The Boy with Lightning Feet (Orion £4.99), about Timmy Twinkle, who is chubby because his mother has left him and he eats as a substitute for love, but who finds a magical talent for football.
9- to 11-years
Seven-to-tens might like to learn How to Be a Knight (Templar £10.99) this summer from a beautiful gilded and illuminated volume of facts and flaps, booklets and a board game, pop-ups and panels, interspersed with Sir Geoffrey de Lance’s instructions to his son about a squire’s skills and sports. Readers can discover how to besiege castles yet also “respect those weaker than yourself”.
One of my favourite books for this age group last year was Louise Arnold’s The Invisible Friend. Its sequel Ghost School (Hodder £5.99) doesn’t disappoint, as Tom and his ghost friend Grey Arthur train an array of other ghosts to befriend those who are lonely at school; again it is moving and full of entertaining surprises.
Other enjoyable sequels include: Ian Ogilvy’s skilled Measle and the Mallockee (OUP £5.99), in which Measle has to defend his baby sister from Warlocks; Steve Voake’s The Web of Fire (Faber £12.99), in which Skipper and Sam, four years after The Dreamwalker’s Child, have to resist a plot to take over the world using ferocious insects and, worse, the US President; Lionboy: The Truth (Puffin £12.99), Zizou Corder’s warm and accessible tale which brings the adventures of Charlie the catspeaker to a reconciliatory and satisfying conclusion in the Caribbean; and Caroline Lawrence’s latest bloodthirsty Roman Mystery The Fugitive from Corinth (Orion £5.99), in which the four protagonists pursue to Athens their handsome young tutor, implicated in the stabbing of Flavia’s father.
A most unusual pleasure is Clair-de-Lune by Cassandra Golds (Orchard £4.99), the poetic and philosophical story of a 12-year-old ballet dancer whose mother died on stage of a broken heart. She is lonely and mute, but encounters with a talking mouse and a wise monk help her to understand big truths about love and freedom and sacrifice.
Most fans will have read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in hardback but the publication of the paperback (Bloomsbury £7.99) is a chance to take away a portable edition. re-examine the clues about who might die in the final volume and swot up on the complicated evidence about Horcruxes.
12 plus
A big fat, satisfying, sophisticated read has won the Carnegie Medal: Mal Peet’s Tamar (Walker £7.99), a remarkably skilled, comprehensively imagined and absorbing saga about wireless operators in the Dutch resistance during the second world war, about danger, romance and betrayal, and the impact of history on subsequent generations.
One of the most remarkable young-adult novels of the year is Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah (Scholastic £5.99), a smart, lively, contemporary story that manages to blast through prejudices without feeling ponderous or worthy, with its sympathetic teenage protagonist who decides to wear the hijab full time. Every teenager in Britain should read it, so all the non-Muslims can get past being squeamish about difference and root for each other.
In Louise Rennison’s Startled by His Furry Shorts (Collins £10.99), her heroine Georgia Nicolson’s amorous agonising reaches new comic heights, but this latest volume also reveals unexpected depths. Taken as a whole, Rennison’s series is actually telling us something valuable about friendships, siblings, parents and being nice to put-upon first-formers. And the cover may be pink, but I swear even boys will laugh.
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