Brave boys and treacherous bandits ensure young readers’ imaginations are well fed, writes Mary Shine Thompson
QUITE THE most moving book I have read this year is David Almond’s The Boy Who Climbed into the Moon (Walker, £9.99), beautifully illustrated by Polly Dunbar. The boy in question is lonely Paul, who refuses to recognise the contours of fact; he is convinced that the moon is a hole in the sky. So it is a relief when he meets Benjamin, a fellow sceptic, a character drawn with exquisite sensitivity. A realist would say that Benjamin suffers from post-traumatic stress following unspecified war experiences. But, with the tilt of a ladder, Benjamin’s brittle strength and his sister Molly’s gung-ho attitude, Paul becomes the boy who climbed into the moon. Saint Exupery’s shade hovers over this gentle, wacky, utterly memorable and inspiring tale.
When it comes to reading, seven-to-nine year olds are leaving the bunny slopes to test gentle pistes unaided. Trouble is, easy-peasy can be uninspiring. The challenge for fiction writers is to create demanding, diverse runs and avoid deadly pitfalls. This assortment does fairly well, as it contains Almond’s real treasure, a tale with a historical setting, and a whole snowfall of comfortable tales of familiar life.
Jamila Gavin’s Danger by Moonlight (Walker, £4.99) takes place thousands of miles and hundreds of years away from contemporary experience. Set in the 17th century, it tells of a Venetian boy, Filippo, who travels to India to rescue the adventurer father he never knew. Hidden away as ransom he has a priceless diamond, the Ocean of the Moon. But he is prey to treacherous bandits and cruel moguls. Disappointments multiply, but as he beholds the Taj Mahal, he and the readers are filled with wonder. Gavin packs this story, told in the continuous present, with dizzying action and adventure.
Linda Newbery opts for a more rhythmic pace. Her eponymous Lob (David Fickling, £10.99), made of rain and wind, of time gone and time waiting, embodies regeneration. He is the Green Man reincarnate, faithful friend of Lucy’s green-fingered grandpa, and formerly of his grandpa also. When Grandpa dies, developers raze his cottage, displacing Lob. For a while, he is homeless and ostracised; when he is captured he pines for open spaces. Lucy’s misery parallels Lob’s as a great, Grandpa-sized gap opens in her life. But both she and Lob discover a surrogate Grandpa, a man devoted to his allotment. Nature and Lucy breathe again.
It doesn’t take long for readers to see that Clementine of Sara Pennypacker’s The Talented Clementine (illustrator Marla Frazee, Hodder Children’s Books, £4.99) has numerous talents, but she is oblivious to them. When her school plans a Talent-Palooza, she panics. In her efforts to measure up to her snooty friend Margaret’s standards, she gets into astounding scrapes, but all ends well when she stops trying and does what comes naturally. Pennypacker’s gifts include humour and the wit to endow Clementine with a distinctive child’s voice, yet enable readers to identify with the diffident, unselfconfident person beneath.
Jenny Valentine packs eight stories into Iggy and Me and the Birthday Party (Illustrated by Joe Berger, Harper Collins, £4.99), the latest title in a series that emulates Dorothy Edwards and Shirley Hughes’s My Naughty Little Sister books. Iggy knows what she wants for her birthday, but dad is having none of it. However, Iggy manages to have the best of all worlds. While the stories themselves, which centre on Iggy’s birthday, are loosely linked and a little thin, the tone, characters and their relationships hold real appeal.
In Gene Kemp’s No Way Out (Faber, £5.99), Alex fails to suppress his anger at his little sister, who has a disability, which channels attention away from him, but he is forced to reconsider when he realises how strong her affection is for him. So far, so good: few enough stories confront disabilities honestly, so the plot is welcome. But two facile devices mar the tale. Telepathic communication between Alex and his twin brother too obviously imparts information to the reader. Furthermore, the story that begins conventionally, with the family embarking on a holiday, continues somewhat predictably when they pass into a parallel and dangerous world through a gateway of fog. Nothing less than integrally linked worlds or an exceptionally strong storyline would revive this old mechanism.
Andi Watson makes no claims to anything but sheer, uncomplicated fun in his frivolous comic-book romp, Glister and the Family Tree (Walker, £4.99). Lonesome Glister’s wish that the family tree would bloom is granted; it duly bears a bumper harvest of relatives whom Glister recognises from family archives. She soon learns that they can be exasperating, querulous, and destructive. Worst of them is Henry, whose weakness for dice means the draughty pile might end up as a site for toxic waste. Trust resourceful Glister to come up with cool solutions that will leave readers queuing for more.
As for me, I want more from David Almond.
Mary Shine Thompson is Dean at St Patricks College, Drumcondra, a college of Dublin City University
