AGES 10 - 12:THE REAL world and its horrors dominate not only realist children's fiction but also traditional forms.
A Tale of Love and Darkness(Chatto Windus, £12.99) by Amos Oz is a classic fable, rustling with unspoken references to Holocaust revisionism but offering no facile resolution to human catastrophes. Two children, Maya and Matti, abandon their silent homeplace for the forest. Their community – except for its outcasts – is in denial since the Mountain Monster herded their animals away years earlier. Watching forest eyes intimate danger, but forest life is richly rewarding. Oz avoids preaching; his trees are sermons.
Oscar Wilde's hand hovers gently over Kate DiCamillo's beautiful surreal fairytale, The Magician's Elephant(Walker, £8.99) – pictured below– stunningly illustrated by Yoko Tanaka. An unloved orphan, Peter, promised his dying mother to care for his infant sister, Adele. But where is Adele? A fortune-teller claims the answer lies with an elephant. And a magician improbably causes an elephant to crash through the town's theatre ceiling, injuring an opera diva. Only Peter recognises the elephant's misery, and we begin to realize just how interrelated the wellbeing of all citizens is.
Sharon Creech's The Unfinished Angel(Andersen Press, £10.99) concerns a kindful angel who's always getting things downside up and has an irritatingly twee turn of phrase. She strikes a friendship with Zola from Manhattan. Angel's idea of do-gooding is to sprinkle images of "childrens with puppy eyes" in villagers' minds. And she "beams warm beams to hungry childrens"
living in the village’s chicken-sheds who, through her ministrations, become rosy-cheeked and ravioli-laden. Not a tale to impressify this hardnosed reader.
From fairytale to school-story. The third children's book by Eoin McNamee, The Ring of Five(Quercus, £6.99), centres on Danny, another solitary, neglected boy. He finds himself in a parallel universe, attending a spy academy called Wilsons: think Hogwarts with Artemis Fowl overtones. There, he learns the arts of betrayal and lying. Nothing is what it seems. Danny struggles to name the loneliness in every soul and to live with it. In the process he confronts his own capacity for treachery by betraying his friend. McNamee skilfully relieves the darkness with humour and a surprise that cannot be divulged.
The gap-year novel has arrived, hot from Belize and Pauline Fisk's capable pen. Kid Cato, hero of In the Trees(Faber, £6.99), is a London outsider searching for his father in Belize. Like many adventurers, he encounters surprises and disappointments, and makes friends – with gap-year students intent on saving the planet. He learns how to handle the young altruists' macho jockeying, and how to eyeball a jaguar. Perhaps his greatest lesson is that home is a state of mind. The book strays close to sentimentality and Kid's fortuitous encounters when his luck is down stretch credibility. The question is, will he end like his errant father?
Set aside scientific credibility and backpack to 1851 with Katie, a Manhattan bibliophile, in K.A.S. Quinn's The Queen Must Die(Atlantic, £9.99). Big-boned, capable Katie survives a genteel century by befriending lonely Princess Alice, solidly sensible like her mother the Queen, and Jamie, son of Queen Victoria's physician. Fact and fiction merge as the story hurtles along. Katie takes gruesome murder and attempted regicide in her stride, prevents anarchists from abducting Alice, and learns to respect her own judgment. Does it matter if the tale relies on that threadbare device, the overheard conversation? Or if Alice occasionally sounds like she attends a comprehensive? The story winds down with a longwinded discussion on time-travel mechanics, but then ratchets up to a – literally – hair-raising ending (time travel creates static electricity) as Katie returns to her needy mother.
More time travel from Katie Roy in Tassie and the Black Baron(Egmont, £5.99), but don't expect
history. The resourceful Tassie and her elderly friend, named Grandma, leave Tassie’s embarrassing family behind to save medieval King Billy from his cousin Brutus’s hostile takeover of Huffington Castle. Tassie exploits Brutus’s hay fever and, with Grandma transformed into a talking horse, the scene is set for a happy ending.
Jamie, of Jane Johnson's Maskmaker(Scholastic, £6.99), is the butt of sneering bullies and his witty jokes are his revenge. He's also a masterful maskmaker. When his teacher pushes him through a mirror wearing a mask, the results are neither predictable nor pleasant. This is another fantastical backpacking continent-hopping adventure. Jamie's challenge is ultimately to learn to distinguish good from evil. His family depends on his getting that right.
Garrett Carr's title, The Badness of Ballydog(Simon & Schuster, £6.99), does little justice to this cracking story, full of post-tsunami, post-boom, post-9/11 anxiety about impending doom. It has its share of plausible teen tensions and macho cruelties. It also has a crass teacher, Heiferon, and a factory owner, Fitzpatrick, straight from clichéville. Ewan, however, is made of singular stuff. Only he and his companions, mechanically-minded Andrew and Meg, who hears voices, grasp Ballydog's fate. Carr knows how to marshal his retelling of a primordial myth, right to its Bond-like climax.
There’s real boy- as well as girl-appeal in this better-than-average kit-bag of books. And if one poignant theme predominates, it’s the existential pain of pre-teens and their crying need for good fiction.
Mary Shine Thompson is dean at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, a college of Dublin City University
