Children’s books of the week

Back to Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Orion £9.99/ebook £5.99, Age 10+, ST Bookshop price £9.49
This wise and well-told debut is the story of Cosmo, whose younger brother has died, and who lives with his grandparents in Ireland in the temporary absence of his mother. His grandfather is succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and Cosmo tries to stave off the inevitable. One day, his grandfather gives him a key with instructions to unlock the gate of a ruined house, Blackbrick Abbey, saying: “You will find me on the other side.” Cosmo meets a 16-year-old boy who turns out to be his grandfather in 1943 and, trapped in time, works in the big house, and becomes involved in a romance and drama that help him to be reconciled to the present. A tear-jerker with lessons in how to live life to the full.

Hooray for Bread by Allan Ahlberg illustrated by Bruce Ingman
Walker £11.99, Age 3-6, ST Bookshop price £10.79
This cheerful rhyming picturebook does more than at first appears. It tells the story of a loaf of bread: the baking and the eating, slice by slice, in verses with bounce, alliteration and often ambitious ideas or language: “morn”, “prowl”, “beady”. The loaf is consumed by adults, children, dogs, ducks, birds and mice, as it is slowly reduced to the last crumbs, through the course of a day, indoors and outdoors. Ingman’s casual, easy-to-read brown ink line delineates animals, furniture and food, encouraging observation and new words, and his loaf, white but freshly baked, has a smiley face and dreams of fields of corn and dough. A plain tale, leavened with whimsy.

A Horse for Angel by Sarah Lean
HarperCollins £6.99/ebook £4.99, Age 7-11, ST Bookshop price £6.64
This second novel by the author of the acclaimed debut A Dog Called Homeless again explores emotion in the lives of youngsters. City girl Nell, whose father has left, whose mother is always busy, and who is shuttled from one after-school activity she does not enjoy to another, spends a fortnight with her aunt and much younger cousins on their farm. There, she encounters Rita next door, in mourning for her late husband, and a strange and menacing girl, Angel, who steals things. Through episodes involving runaway chickens, the birth of piglets and a foal with wonky legs, an old fairy tale resonates, while Nell makes and saves a friend, and comes to terms with loss. Touching, reflective and lyrical.

The Lemur’s Tale by Ophelia Redpath
Templar £7.99, ST Bookshop price £7.59
Inspired by a lemur that was kept as a pet by the Courtauld family, this striking picturebook by a skilled artist tells the story of a ring-tailed lemur, stolen from Madagascar, who escapes from a ship and hides in an eccentric Victorian household. A lonely little girl is blamed for the damage he causes during his night-time antics (nibbling plants, raiding the larder etc), until he is found, all is forgiven, and he becomes her exotic friend. Scrutiny of the comical and lively images rewards repeated readings, and children can hunt for the flash of lemur’s tail or face in each picture, and puzzle over the creature’s hiding place.

The Phenomenals: A Tangle of Traitors by FE Higgins
Macmillan £5.99/ebook £5.99, ST Bookshop price £5.99, Age 9+
Higgins has always been the novelist for smart kids who want to widen their vocabulary. Anyone daunted to find the word “paletot” on page one should leave well alone, but those happy to discover “arenaceous”, “vellicating”, “cuspidate” and “fletcherising”, for instance, will be enriched. This gothic fantasy of a world with a tar pit containing tormented souls, in which a giant ex-mariner and three youngsters — a pickpocket, a rich girl and a skilled hunter of supernatural creatures — take on evil forces, is fleshed out by Higgins’s wild imagination and embellished by her neologisms. The characterisation is vivid and the plotting complex, but not too much so for eager readers.

Into That Forest by Louis Nowra
Egmont £10.99/ebook £10.99, Sunday Times Bookshop price £9.89, Age 11+
This novel by a distinguished Australian writer is the narrative, in a slightly non-standard English, of a 76-year-old woman looking back on a strange episode in her childhood. It begins when she is six and her parents in Tasmania take her on a picnic with a friend. In a storm on the way home their boat overturns on a river and she and her friend survive to be adopted by a pair of tigers in the forest. For four years they hunt, eat raw meat, learn to communicate in tiger growls, come to smell, see and hear like tigers, walk on all fours, and all but lose the power of speech. The result is a strange, powerful, original tale that is both harshand touching.

Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner
Hot Key £10.99/ebook £6.99, Age 13+, ST Bookshop price £9.89
This is the narrative of a dyslexic boy, Standish Treadwell, who lives in the Motherland — a totalitarian state of secret police, torture and food shortages — and attends a school where corporal punishment can be fatal if the sadistic teacher gets carried away. Although his parents have disappeared, Standish’s spirit is sustained by his grandfather, and by defiant Hector, with “sea green eyes” that go “stormy with indifference” when challenged by a brute. Standish sabotages a fake moon landing, staged for propaganda, in a gesture of hope and love and freedom. The result is no ordinary book for young adults. Startlingly original, sophisticated and moving, Maggot Moon is out of this world.

Rosie’s Magic Horse by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake
Walker £12.99/ebook £9.99, 3+, ST Bookshop price £9.99
This new picturebook by Quentin Blake uses text by Russell Hoban, who died in 2011. It is about a horse made out of ice-lolly sticks that comes to life and flies, enabling a little girl to bring back pirate treasure to her parents, who are inundated with bills. It combines colloquialisms, made-up words — “unvanned”, “stickled”, “rehorsed”—- and the poetic: “There was wind, there was rain, there were brown leaves blowing.” But the expressiveness and zing of Blake’s pictures, with detail of a rainy street, kitchen table, child’s bedroom, rooftop party in an exotic city, pirates’ knees-up, desert with vultures, jungle with parrots and landscape with pink sunset, are what really do the magical transporting here.

The Paper Dolls by Julia Donaldson illus Rebecca Cobb
Macmillan £10.99, Age 3+, ST Bookshop price £9.89
A picturebook that seems simple but gets richer every time you look at it, The Paper Dolls is a partly rhyming and repetitive tale about a child’s imaginative play. We see a little girl who has cut out a row of paper dolls with her mother, giving them adventures at home and in the garden, but we also see the scenes of her imagination. When disaster strikes the dolls (“Ticky and Tacky/and Jackie the Backie,/And Jim with two noses/And Jo with the bow”), the book opens out into the story of a whole lifetime and of two generations. Cobb’s illustrations capture the joy of childhood; between them, she and the Children’s Laureate have made a book that works like magic.

Where My Wellies Take Me by Clare and Michael Morpurgo, Illustrated by Olivia Lomenech Gill
Templar £17.99, Age 7+, ST Bookshop price £16.19
This beautiful book, designed as a child’s scrapbook about the countryside, contains inspiring drawings of wildlife and farm life, some on foldout pages, and poems vivid with the details and sensations of the outdoors, from nursery rhymes to Seamus Heaney. The handwritten narrative follows Pippa as she spends a May day walking and riding around a Devon village, with her observations about trees, wildflowers, caterpillars, beetles, birds, cows, pigs, fish and chickens. Stunningly drawn, it makes you want to rush outside as it evokes the joy and glory of being in the fresh air.

The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas by David Almond, illustrated by Oliver Jeffers
Walker £9.99, Age 9+, ST Bookshop price £9.49
In Tyneside after the decline of shipbuilding, orphan Stanley is adopted by his kindly aunt and his uncle Ernie. His uncle, though, driven a bit mad by unemployment, gets carried away in his enthusiasm for the fish-canning business he sets up in his house, so Stanley resorts to joining a fair. Fishy events follow, with villains who are caricatures of interfering jobsworths and a motley cast whose own hearts are, ultimately, good and true. This book will make hearts sing. The story soars in and out of realism, interweaves the magical and the ordinary, stirs up big ideas, and exercises the imagination by inviting children to make up their own ending.

Shrunk by FR Hitchcock
Hot Key £5.99/ebook £4.99, Age 9+, ST Bookshop price £5.99
Tom lives reluctantly in Bywater-on-Sea, where his formidable grandmother runs a model village, while his parents try to perfect their embarrassingly hopeless magicians’ double act. He finds he can shrink objects to sight-size by viewing them through a circle in his fingers and imagining a click. One day he accidentally shrinks Jupiter to the size of a bead, causing the earth to heat up and threatening the end of the world. He faces the challenge of putting everything right, with a motley crew of unlikely allies in a collaboration that brings everyone together, and involves revelations about the odd history of the town. Carrying its complicated premise lightly, this cleverly structured story will make its readers laugh out loud.

The Grunts in Trouble by Philip Ardagh
Nosy Crow £7.99, Age 6-9, ST Bookshop price £7.59
Axel Scheffler’s illustrations impart a quirky comic charm to Ardagh’s daft story about the Grunts, whose silliness and bad behaviour are in the tradition of Roald Dahl’s Twits and Andy Stanton’s Mr Gum. They travel about in a donkey-drawn caravan, insulting people and kicking things, like playground bullies, and accompanied by their nice “son” Sunny, who was pinched in infancy from a washing line where he was hung up by his ears. Like the caravan, the plot wanders around rather aimlessly, and Ardagh will always go the extra mile for the sake of a joke, even to the point of being a bit tiresome, like giggly seven-year-olds getting carried away. So he is perfectly on their wavelength.

The Seeing by Diana Hendry
Bodley Head £10.99/ebook £11.47, Age 11+, ST Bookshop price £9.89
This novel is a powerful return, after a 10-year gap, for Whitbread-winning Hendry. Set in a seaside town in 1953, it focuses on the aftermath of war. Lizzie, a 13-year-old from a very proper family, is won over by the exoticness of wild Natalie, whose father died in a POW camp, and who has a strange, vengeful obsession in which she involves her eight-year-old brother, who has learning difficulties. Natalie and Lizzie share the cleverly interwoven triple narrative with Hugo, an artist who spends the summer in a yellow caravan on the beach, having lost his own brother to the Nazis, and who becomes a benevolent friend to the children. With a surprising denouement, this is an intriguing, atmospheric and memorable tale.

London for Children by Matteo Percoli
Macmillan £14.99, Age 7-12, ST Bookshop price £12.99
This book is based on 6,000 photographs made into two scrupulously detailed 12-metre-long drawings of the banks of the Thames, annotated with titbits about London’s history and supplemented with a timeline of events from 55BC to the present day. It is also two books back-to-back: one opens to show the north bank; the other, when you turn the volume over, shows the south. At this limelight moment for London, it is an ideal souvenir — a record of every bridge and riverside building in the city and a cornucopia of the kinds of did-you-know facts that are irresistible to read aloud: for instance, that 16ft below London’s streets is a layer of black ash because Boadicea burnt the city to the ground in AD61.

The Apothecary by Maile Meloy
Andersen Press £6.99/ebook £4.49, Age 11+, ST Bookshop price £6.64
This magical adventure set in 1952 involves espionage, the cold war, nuclear testing, an Arctic journey, potions for invisibility and ones that turn people into birds, not to mention a burgeoning romance. The narrator is Janie, the Californian daughter of wisecracking scriptwriters newly come to London. Janie feels out of place at school until she meets Benjamin, who wants to be a spy. Written by an American in transparent prose, with only the occasional error of vocabulary (English people saying “named for” or “popover”), this involving yarn offers some insight into history, and engaging characters — such as cheeky cockney Pip, who overcomes obstacles with his lock-picking, detective-duping skills. The story persuades us that “even the darkest forces are never all bad”.

The Abominables by Eva Ibbotson illustrated by Sharon Rentta
Marion Lloyd £10.99/ebook £10.99, Age 8-11, ST Bookshop price £9.89
This novel is an unexpected bonus. After Eva Ibbotson died at the age of 85 in 2010, this manuscript was found among her papers. It is a classic Ibbotson story — with humour, brave children and miraculous creatures threatened by destructive humans. A young Victorian girl, Lady Agatha, kidnapped by a yeti in the Himalayas, becomes governess to his family in a hidden valley, teaching them to speak and bringing them up with a strict regard for good manners and a love of stories. When she is old and the yetis are under threat, she appoints two youngsters to transport them to the safety of her old English stately home. This lost treasure is a joy. If only such a discovery could happen again.

Cordelia Codd: Not Just the Blues by Claire O'Brien
Orchard £5.99, Age 9+, ST Bookshop price £5.99
Narratives of pre-teens with problems at school and separated parents are easy to come by, but Cordelia, the heroine of this story, is distinguished not least by a passion for classic movies, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. She aspires to be the greatest costume designer in the history of cinema. Bullied by mean girls who used to be her friends, she discovers that the class geek is a friend more worth having after all. Together they plot an intrepid adventure to bring back her renegade father and cheer up her depressed mother. Full of comically expressed anger and quirky ideas, this is a story with wisdom, laughs and a satisfying ending.

Shift by Em Bailey
Electric Monkey £6.99/ebook £5.59, Age 12+, ST Bookshop price £6.64
Shift is a novel that does precisely that: when we think we know what is going on, everything changes. Olive, the free-spirited narrator, tells us about her best friend Ami, about her former friend and now enemy Katie, and about the arrival at school of a nondescript new girl, Miranda. Gossip says that Miranda killed her parents, and Olive swallows an internet-inspired suggestion that she might be an alien “shapeshifter”. But things are more complicated than this sci-fi notion. Some, if not all, of the dangers in this ingeniously told story are real: anorexia, alcohol, psychological damage. As the sand moves beneath our feet, we are swept irresistibly to the end by a tense mystery and a charming romance.

A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge
Macmillan £12.99/ebook £13, Age 8-12, ST Bookshop price £11.69
Award-winner Frances Hardinge’s latest novel concerns an underground world in which facial expressions are bought like garments, and the poor can only afford a few basic ones. “Facesmiths” bring out new styles with such names as Dewdrops Regarded in a Spirit of Hope. Transplanted into this world is Neverfell, who at 13 shocks those around her by having an ever-changing human face, which reveals her true emotions and cannot lie. With an intriguing plot about Neverfell’s search for her own lost history and a court full of deceivers and plotters who wish to make use of her transparency, this is the most enjoyable children’s book of the year so far.

Black Heart Blue by Louisa Reid
Penguin Razorbill £6.99/ebook £6.99, Age 13+, ST Bookshop price £6.64
This is the emotive, sometimes shocking story of modern-day twins, beautiful Hephzibah and disfigured Rebecca. Their father is an evangelical preacher, their mother damaged and ineffectual, their home a prison in which they are abused. The story begins after Hephzibah suddenly dies, and alternating narratives in both girls’ voices before the death (and Rebecca’s after) tell the story of what led up to it. Rebecca is thoughtful, book-loving and afraid, sometimes poetic; “Hephzi” is blithe, selfish and daring. Being sent to college after inadequate home-schooling gives Hephzi her first chance of rebellion and friendship, as well as love, offered by the handsome Craig. But she is a victim of her own ignorance as well as of her psychopathic father. If the book has a message, it is that it is not enough to stand by when others suffer: actions are what count.

Babies, Babies, Babies! by Catherine and Laurence Anholt
Orchard Books £11.99, Age 1-3, ST Bookshop price £10.79
In their latest picturebook for the very young, the Anholts show once again how tuned in they are to what works for small children. Using rhymes, metre and alliteration, this is a charming catalogue of food, clothes, transport, colours and animal noises, combined with actions to copy (tickle, clap, peek-a-boo), as well as a beach scene and a bedtime routine that are small stories in themselves. There are ideas for play, from building dens to banging saucepans, a bunny to look for on each page, and plenty of recognisable detail of the lives of babies and toddlers. Full of busy little vignettes, this is a book to encourage language, learning, looking and interaction with parents. It offers repeated hours of stimulation, and proves its own message, that “the best toy of all is a book”.

White Dolphin by Gill Lewis
OUP £8.99, Age 9+, ST Bookshop price £8.54
This second novel by the author of the acclaimed Sky Hawk is the story of Kara, whose marine biologist mother has disappeared in the Solomon Islands. Kara lives with her father in a Cornish seaside town with an offshore reef and a bay visited by dolphins. Together, Kara and her dad struggle to make a living by catching lobsters from the boat her parents built together. Before her disappearance, Kara’s mother instituted a temporary dredging ban in the town to protect the reef, but the ban is about to expire, and the villainous local fisherman plans to scrape everything from the seabed. Finding an unexpected ally in stroppy Felix, a new boy at school who has cerebral palsy, Kara tries to protect the bay, take on her enemies and come to terms with her mother’s fate. This is a lyrical, emotive, engrossing adventure that carries its environmental message lightly.