Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise that the world’s great cities have detached themselves from their terrestrial foundations and are floating across the sky like so many urban space ships, swallowing up smaller fry, you’d probably think this is asking a bit much of the reader, but somehow you take it all on board. In this futuristic scenario the characters and their modes of thinking are in fact rather quaint – like Miss Torpenhow, a governess whose floating town of Thorbury has been captured by a diabolical former protégé. The assurance of the storytelling carries you along.
Rick Riordan has invented an entire genre: Greek myth crossed with American teenage comedy. Percy Jackson (son of Poseidon) has the angst of a young New Yorker in a city in which his tutor is a centaur. His Halloween assignment, along with his semi-divine girlfriend Annabeth and his satyr friend Grover, is to pet-sit Hecuba, a hell hound belonging to the witch goddess Hecate. At his best, Riordan can be very funny. Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Puffin, £16.99) is one of his good ones.
Rick Riordan has invented an entire genre: Greek myth crossed with American teenage comedy
Contemporary stories about the second world war often miss the mark, but Chris Vick’s Shadow Creatures (Zephyr, £8.99) is a cracker. It’s a version of real events, based on his family’s history and the story of Norway after the German invasion. The Nazi takeover of schools, the hardships of occupation and the boy smuggling resistance propaganda in loaves of bread had me gripped.
There’s always something new out of Africa in the way of rattling youth fiction, and When It’s Your Turn for Midnight by Blessing Musariri (Zephyr, £8.99) is extraordinary. A teenage girl runs away from her quarrelling parents to the home of her feisty grandmother. There she finds herself with four Gogos, or grannies, each of whom has played a mysterious part in the Zimbabwean war of independence, and whose unscrupulousness make her look staid. It’s when the Gogos decide to take on a criminal gang interfering with their business activities that a story of family secrets takes on an anarchic aspect.
There’s uplift, too, in Kate di Camillo’s Ferris (Bloomsbury, £10.99), about a girl born under a Ferris wheel, her elegant grandmother, a sad ghost and her horrid little sister who tries to hold up a bank. There is also her uncle in the basement doing a painting of world history and her teacher, Mrs Mielk, whose vocabulary lists enliven the story. It’s about words, death, family and friendship and it’s funny and touching.
The protagonist of The Boy in the Suit (Scholastic, £7.99) is Solo, who not only has a weird name but a troubled mother. She devises a way of feeding him by dressing him in a frightful suit to gatecrash strangers’ funeral parties, but it all goes horribly wrong. (How sad that this should be a problem. Anyone is welcome to mine.) It’s all part of the endless humiliations of a child living with a toxic mother, and the story is a moving reminder of children’s protectiveness even towards bad parents.
It’s impossible to categorise Mark Forsyth’s A Riddle for a King (David Fickling Books, £8) except to say that it’s the nearest I’ve come to a contemporary Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its paradoxes and wordplay and the entirely unaccountable adventures that befalla boy called Philo in a world inside a grand-father clock. He makes friends with a girl, Verity, who has a logical mind, and to cut a good story short she gets turned into a teapot and Philo must rescue her. For a child who likes puns it’s very entertaining.
One of the most pleasing-looking books is, suitably enough, Meet the Typographer by Gaby Bazin (Design for Today, £16.50), an engrossing account of the endangered art of letterpress printing and its history from 11th-century China to our day. The illustrations are bold and brilliant.
Amazing Jellyfish by the Czech writer Michael Stavaric, translated by Oliver Latsch, with exquisite drawings by Michèle Ganser (Pushkin Children’s Books, £20), is wordy and opinionated, with lots about the author. But there are plenty of fun facts, too, about Australia’s most poisonous animals, and everything you might ever want to know about jellyfish, including the Lion’s Mane and the Firework as well as terrible jellyfish jokes. I loved it. Further up the chain of creation, there’s the charming Clever Crow by Chris Butterworth (Walker, £12.99) with lively watercolours by Olivia Lomenech Gill, including a beautiful display of corvid eggs. They are clever too.
As for fictitious creatures, there’s Zadie Smith and Nick Laird’s Weirdo Goes Wild (Penguin, £12.99), about a guinea pig called Maud who practises judo. She goes with her owner, Kit, on a camping adventure, where a hedgehog teaches her about nature and she manages without screens for two whole days. With cute illustrations by Magenta Fox, it’s very sweet.
You could say that Ruth Krauss’s Everything Under a Mushroom (NYRB Kids, £16.99) is a nonsense book, but this charming depiction of children’s activities, from capturing the moon to playing bears, would be a lovely thing to read aloud to a small child.
Among the year’s welcome reprints is Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe – a book I love passionately about a near-orphan boy called Tolly who goes to stay with his great-grandmother in the wonderful old house of Green Knowe, where the living past is always just around the corner. It’s all the more haunting for the drawings by Peter Boston, which look like woodcuts. This edition (Faber, £12.99), for the 70th anniversary, is beautiful.
The great Joan Aiken’s Tales of London Town (Manderley Press, £18.99) is a pocket-sized collection of her loosely linked stories about a wild and imaginary part of the city. ‘The Erl King’s Daughter’, my own daughter’s favourite, is a creepy version of Goethe’s poem, but with a happy ending. What a genius storyteller she was.
The moral tales of Struwwelpeter by the German psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffman (Farshore, £14.99) have been terrifying young readers since 1845. Its unspeakable children include Conrad, the Little Suck-a-Thumb who ignores every warning and has his thumbs snipped off by the Scissor Man. A must-read for every home.
In a similar subversive vein are Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales in an adorable little edition (Macmillan’s Collector’s Library, £9.99). If you don’t know the story of Jim, Who Ran away from his Nurse and was Eaten by a Lion, you jolly well ought to.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mr Bliss (Harper Collins, £20) is a facsimile of a story that he wrote for his children in 1936 with his idiosyncratic illustrations, about Mr Bliss, a man with a very tall hat who buys a car and finds it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Robert Lacey’s Nursery Rhymes (Paper Argosies, £20) isn’t a facsimile but a charming book of rhymes accompanied by wonderful pictures by Claud Lovat Fraser. I never expected to find William Blake here, but it works just fine.
For an overview of children’s literature, old and new, you cannot do better than The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith of this parish (OneWorld, £30). It’s a book for those who still love children’s books as wellas a guide for buyers of books for their own children.
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