CHILDRENS' BOOKS: AGES 10-12reviewed by ROBERT DUNBAR
SHORTLISTED LAST year for both the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award, Dinah Capparucci's debut novel, Aliens Don't Eat Dog Food, introduced young readers to Jordan, Boy Dave and Ryan, a trio of 12-year-olds hell-bent on creating mischief at every opportunity. They now return, in Disaster Bunnies Save the Day(Kind of) (Scholastic, £4.99) to wreak even more havoc, on this occasion culminating in a town parade which, in spite of all their protestations of innocence and non-responsibility, goes spectacularly adrift. Fans of madcap boyish escapades in the Just William tradition of wily child taking on irritated adult are going to be entertained here: it is all good and, it must be said, very clean fun, not least in a sequence involving a sauna and a bathroom.
The humour in Margaret Mahy's Portable Ghosts(Faber, £5.99) is rather more sophisticated than Capparucci's, reflecting a fair measure of what Ditta, its young heroine, refers to at one point as "trickery-flickery". Past and present are engagingly entwined in what is essentially a ghost story for the computer age as we follow Ditta's determination to assist her friend Max solve the mystery of eerie goings-on in the new house to which his family has recently moved. By coincidence, she herself has just witnessed – and spoken to – a boy ghost in her school library; he, it gradually becomes clear, has a rather sad, but fascinating, historical connection with contemporary events. Mahy's usual light touch is everywhere in evidence.
From a Mahy world where children very much direct events and are given every opportunity to do so, we move in Benjamin J Myers's The Bad Tuesdays: Twisted Symmetry(Orion, £6.99) to a gloomy futuristic landscape where children's roles are much more cruelly defined. Myers excels in his graphic descriptions of this soulless terrain, dominated by power struggles between the "Twisted Symmetry" of the title and a rival organisation known as "The Committee": it is the fate of Chess Tuesday and her twin brothers, Box and Splinter, to be caught between the warring forces. The rapid-fire abusive banter between the brothers provides a much-needed diversion in what is otherwise a very dark, if powerfully written, narrative.
Darkness is all around also in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones(HarperCollins, £12.99), but so also is the sparky banter which characterises the developing relationship between Skulduggery, the skeletal detective, and his 14-year-old assistant, Valkyrie. The Ireland – and more particularly the Dublin – in which they pursue various wonderfully named members of a frighteningly grotesque criminal world is portrayed, as one of the characters expresses it, as a territory of "death and madness and mayhem", fully living up to its reputation as a repository of "secrets both magnificent and terrifying". His tongue firmly in his cheek, Landy negotiates his macabre world with style and wit.
"You must turn the darkness into light." Thus the mission entrusted to young Brendan in Eithne Massey's novel based on the movie The Secret of Kells(O'Brien, €7.99), a mission to be accomplished through his participation in the making of Ireland's most celebrated ancient manuscript. The Irish monastic life of the ninth century, the various personalities of the monks and the often violent world outside their walls are re-created in a straightforward prose which succeeds in conveying a flavour of the magical and mysterious inherent in the subject-matter. Striking as some of the Cartoon Studio's black-and-white illustrations are, they cannot quite do justice to the glowing colours of the Book of Kells itself. But their picture-book version, in Mary Webb's retelling of Tomm Moore's screenplay for the same film (O'Brien, €12.99), more than compensates.
The darkness of the woods surrounding Kells is well matched in the decidedly sinister Transylvanian domain of the novel which, according to its cover, is called Lazlo Strangolov's Feather and Bone: Ghost Writing from the Underground(Walker, £6.99). But caution about authorship is required from the moment we start reading Matt Whyman's "Foreword", detailing the spooky circumstances of the book's provenance: what manner of ghost writing is going on here? It would appear to be an everyday story of Transylvanian folk, centred on some very gruesome practices at an alleged chicken farm known as The Squawk Box and featuring a cast of some very entertainingly distressed characters. As its young hero, Kamil, on the trail of a mysteriously missing father, comes to realise, it is indeed "an unspeakable business". The humour throughout is darkest black, the style totally tongue-in-cheek and the whole concept hilarious: all very clever – but not for the squeamish or for anyone with an allergy to poultry or associated odours.
With some degree of relief we turn, in Jane Simmons's Beryl Goes Wild(Orchard, £4.99), to an altogether more placid world, even if its young pig heroine is to find herself swapping her everyday farm existence for an excursion into wilder territory. Her story becomes a touching fable which focuses on a search for home, written in a style where simplicity of expression does not rule out complexity of emotion. The need for love and friendship and the understanding of the effects of loss are subtly explored; the reassurance of the familiar and the challenge of the unknown are thoughtfully balanced.
If presentation and production values still count for something, then Martin Jenkins's retelling of Cervantes's Don Quixote(Walker, £16.99) must easily qualify as gift book of the season. Chris Riddell's splendid, full-colour illustrations are completely in keeping with the rambling exuberance of the original: a marvellous introduction for the young reader to one of the classics of world literature.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s books and reading