THE MEDICI SEAL (10+)
by Theresa Breslin
Doubleday; £12.99; 496pp

TALES OF GREAT MEN seen from the child’s perspective always make a good subject for children’s novels, and if G. A. Henty’s style of storytelling now seems sadly out of date, the appetite for it is undiminished.

Robert J. Harris’s Will Shakespeare and the Pirate’s Fire tackles its subject with gusto. We begin with the teenaged Will and Hamnet, his best friend, escaping capture on Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate.

Will, doubly disgraced as poacher and Catholic, joins a troupe of travelling players disguised as a girl. Soon after, they arrive at the house of Dr Dee, astrologer and would-be wizard, whose tedious play, Pluto and Proserpina, needs copying. Will begins a little alchemy on what will, of course, become A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Packed with spies, sword-fights, daring escapes and traitorous villains, this is just the kind of swashbuckling adventure to engage bored schoolchildren in Shakespeare. The fugitive Will claims the pseudonym of Robin Goodfellow; Dr Dee is the model for Prospero, and his mish-mash of real science and superstition include a theatrical prop, which saves Queen Elizabeth from the usual Catholic assassin. Harris’s previous thriller, Leonardo and the Death Machine, also played with the boyhood of a famous artist.

Leonardo da Vinci reappears as an adult in Theresa Breslin’s The Medici Seal. It is 1502, and young Matteo is saved from drowning by da Vinci. He becomes the Maestro’s servant as he dissects human bodies, designs better chain mail and paints La Gioconda. Murder and mayhem travel in their wake, for unknown to Leonardo, Matteo is being hunted for an important secret, which both the Borgias and the Medicis will kill to obtain. Breslin is one of those respected children’s novelists who has been bubbling under the surface for some time. The Medici Seal should change that. Not only is it a gripping historical thriller, it is an exceptionally touching exploration of a relationship between a man and a boy. It is Matteo who spots the famous Star of Bethlehem, immortalised by Leonardo, who pays for his tuition. But Matteo has gypsy medical knowledge of his own.

The Medici Seal is rich — some might say too rich — in Cinquecento detail and dramatic incident with Matteo joining his friend Paolo’s band of condottiere to fight on the French side against the Pope.

Having brought ruin and rape upon the dell’Orte family through the assassin Sandino (a terrifying figure who uses his bony thumb-nails to gouge out victim’s eyes), he does his best to protect them even after he falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful noblewoman in Lucrezia Borgia’s circle.

Leonardo, the ultimate Renaissance man, is a fascinating figure and a children’s novel about him is overdue. His fastidiousness, compassion, intellectual curiosity, wit and boundless creativity are all described by Breslin with deft scholarship and sympathy, though one may wonder why his homosexuality is omitted from her frank account of both rape and heterosexual courtship. No matter. This is an enchanting novel about genius, and a gift to an inquiring mind.

What’s more...

SAM STARS AT SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE (5+)
by Pauline Francis and Jane Tattersfield
Frances Lincoln, £11.99
Stage-struck boy in charming picture book.

CUE FOR TREASON (8+)
by Geoffrey Trease
Puffin, £5.99
Original and best thriller about fugitive boy-actor.

KING OF SHADOWS (10+)
by Susan Cooper
Puffin, £5.99
Thoughtful timeslip tale of an American Puck at the old Globe.

I, JUAN DE PAREJA (10+)
by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, available second-hand
Velásquez seen by his boy slave. Sublime.

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