THE children's writer whose work earns the accolade of, popular and critical success" is as rare a phenomenon as the adult equivalent. Indeed, it is even rarer, since in this context "popular" generally means "popular with children", while "critical" usually implies "approved by adults" - adults whose criteria for bestowing approval are unlikely to be those drawn on by the young. This tension between what children genuinely want to read and what adults feel that they should (or should not) be reading has provided a starting point for lengthy and often acrimonious debate.
On the one hand, earnest librarians have been known to ban Enid Blyton, poor Biggles has had his flying wings unceremoniously clipped, and Roald Dahl, with his sadism, sexism, xenophobia and much much else, has apparently corrupted a generation; children, however, insist that these are among their favourite books and writers. On the other hand, literary reviewers and academic critics extol the fiction of writers such as Alan Garner and William Mayne and argue passionately about the post modernism of Aidan Chambers's "adolescent" quartet; it would, one sometimes thinks, be interesting to meet a young person who actually reads (or understands) such novels.
Sadly, at a time when most of the evidence suggests that children are reading less and less of anything, such debate may be increasingly irrelevant: the anxiety is not so much about what they read, but that they read at all. Unsurprisingly, the child known as the reluctant reader" is currently the focus of much attention from writers and publishers and a mini industry has developed in an attempt to wean him or her back to books.
It is an industry where the forces of idealism are in strong competition with those of cynicism and opportunism, and it has to be said, with regret, that it often seems as if the latter are winning. It is to be hoped that the deliberations of this year's Summer School on Children's Literature, devoted to this topic of reading reluctance, will play their part in ensuring that the battle is not abandoned too easily or too quickly.
The Australian writer Paul Jennings, who will be giving the opening address at the Summer School, has shown in a remarkable series of short story collections over the past ten years that the dream of earning child and adult endorsement is totally possible of fulfilment. As an introduction to his work, Wendy Cooling's selection in Thirteen Unpredictable Tales from Paul Jennings (Viking, £10.99 in UK) could hardly be bettered: if material such as this does not draw in the most "reluctant" of readers it is hard to imagine what they might enjoy.
Here are immediately accessible stories bursting with a vitality of character and incident, in most of which the ending while subtly and carefully prefigured - comes with a resounding detonation. Additionally, they have wit, a touch of the macabre and a sense of mischief and irreverence. Best of all, they convey a young person's sceptical glimpses of an adult world often characterised by inconsistency, pomposity and unfairness, and provide, in their constant good humour, the perfect antidote to such shortcomings.
"You can be what - and who you want to be" could well serve as a summary of much of the positive "message" behind Jennings's stories, though such a message always arises incidentally out of what he writes as distinct from dictating it. In Anthony Hornwitz's The Switch (Walker, £8.99, in UK) in which the sentence actually appears - the message is, perhaps, a little more overt, in what is at times an almost political novel dealing with serious matters such as social inequality, unscrupulous scientific research and Third World exploitation.
But the central narrative involving a dramatic switch in roles for two boys from radically different backgrounds, is extremely entertaining, with some very well realised moments of high tension" and with a colourful cast of Dickensian eccentrics and grotesques. (We'll overlook an Irish housekeeper called Mrs O'Blimey: her role is a very minor one.) The punchy style, snappy dialogue and lively pace make an attractive novel, one which could be handed with some confidence to the "reluctant" reader.
By contrast, a children's book such as Patricia Wrighton's Shadows of Time (Random House, £9.99 in UK) is likely to appeal to only the most experienced young readers. This - from an adult perspective - is a beautifully written, evocative and lyrical novel which ambitiously sets out to trace more than a hundred years of Australian history from settlement to independence as perceived through the eyes of a young white girl and an aboriginal boy: their journey across the vastness of their continent and through the continuum of time is a fascinating exploration of a search for personal and national identity, played out. against a landscape where elemental and supernatural agencies perpetually impinge on human affairs.
This is not for the "reluctant", but for those readers who have internalised the conventions of literary storytelling and who accept the need for a narrative to grow, to weave in and out and, occasionally, to be elusive and enigmatic. It will not - to use the title of our Summer School - be "simply read". But then, some would say, nothing really worthwhile ever will be.