For children as for adults, the best time to read is during the summer holidays. But what to pack?
Peter Brown’s My Teacher Is a Monster! (Macmillan, £11.99) may bring back fearful memories of school for five-plus, but is an otherwise witty, elegantly expressive picture book from the author of Mr Tiger Goes Wild. There’s a touch of Maurice Sendak in his hero’s discovery that monsters are not always what they seem. We have all been the terrified, pop-eyed Bobby at some point, but beleaguered teachers trying to control a class will welcome his discovery that the fearsomely tusked, green-faced monster who shouts at him for misbehaving morphs into a kind young woman after he rescues her favourite hat.
A perfectly horrid picture book, In One End and Out the Other by Dr Mike Goldsmith (Red Shed, £8.99), will cause howls of rude delight as it goes into the fundamentals of excrement. The flaps conceal useful information (“A plastic carrier bag can take 1,000 years to decompose”) for future citizens, but there’s enough toilet humour to make it irresistible for four-plus.
Philip Reeve’s Goblins, Philip Ardagh’s The Grunts and Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books all have delightful new instalments out this summer, but for the nine-plus football-mad reader, Morris Gleitzman’s Extra Time (Puffin, £6.99) is a comedy with brains and heart. Matt is a teenage football genius, and his struggles are narrated by his younger sister – and manager. Will he rediscover “the joyful spirit of the beautiful game”, or will his academy training destroy it?
David Almond’s Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads (Barrington Stoke, £6.99, nine-plus) is about a gang whose pranks are fairly innocent until a scrawny, musical kid from East Germany turns up and becomes the focus for the gang leader Joe’s persecutions. Almond has a huge talent for describing the eternal battle between what is vile in human nature and the still, small voice of moral courage.
It is this voice that also comes through in Esme Kerr’s The Glass Bird Girl (Chicken House, £6.99). Edie is an orphan, sent to boarding school to keep an eye on Anastasia, the dreamy, vulnerable daughter of a wealthy Russian prince. Naturally, the old-fashioned Malory Towers setting (“You will find, in the end, that it’s a relief not to be in touch with the outside world,” the head teacher tells Edie) brings with it bullying, but what emerges is a web of deception with its roots in Edie’s mother’s past. Sensitively written, this is a cut above most fiction for girls of nine-plus.
An enchanting historical novel for 11-plus is Runaway by Marie-Louise Jensen (Oxford University Press, £6.99). Back from America in Georgian England, Charlotte dresses up as a boy after her father is murdered. She’s friendless and penniless but her love and knowledge of horses win her a job as a stable-boy at a grand house. Jensen’s storytelling verve and eye for period detail make her read like a cross between Black Beauty and Georgette Heyer. Our spirited heroine overcomes a prized horse’s colic, her own tendency to attract trouble (“You fight like a girl,” she keeps being told) and a growing attachment to the young steward who offers her fair employment but fails to penetrate her disguise. With a dash of class war in the brew, it’s an addictive read.
Joanna Nadin’s Eden (Walker, £6.99) is set in Cornwall and has undertones of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We know from the start that a beautiful house is burnt, and that Evie’s cousin Bea has died. Her grief, guilt and gorgeous narrative voice make this a memorable psychological suspense novel about first love – and first hate – for 12-plus, particularly girls.
Even more gripping is Helen Grant’s Demons of Ghent (Corgi, £7.99, 13-plus). It carries on characters from Silent Saturday, but also stands alone as a modern Gothic thriller that is never predictable. Grant is uniquely comfortable among YA authors with Continental characters and settings, and this story about a Flemish serial killer blends superstition and psychosis with visceral terror as its spiky heroine, Veerle, is pursued by a zealot who believes he is inspired by a 600-year-old painting.
Few teenagers face the problems of Sophia Bennett’s narrator in The Castle (Chicken House, £6.99). Peta doesn’t believe her soldier father is dead, and when a boy rings her to pass on a private mathematical joke, she embarks on a nail-biting quest to find and rescue her dad. Though it’s not published until August, this is one of the best thrillers for 12-plus I’ve read since Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series. Peta is both a believable modern teenager and an action heroine of jaw-dropping courage. So, too, is her mysterious friend Jamal, a slave on the Mediterranean island hideaway of a billionaire. This half-starved, intellectually brilliant boy is a Muslim hero who is trying to save not only his own life but his timid sister’s, in an adventure that deserves a sequel or two. Happily there is no tiresome love interest, though there are mild irritants: why make up a pseudonym for Facebook?
Ever since her 2009 prize-winning debut, Threads, Bennett has combined social conscience and emotional intelligence with hilariously accurate depictions of the fashion and pop music scenes. This one is outstanding, and will fill a holiday with zest.
Amanda Craig is a novelist and children’s books critic
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