CHRISTMAS has rolled round once again: noise, breaking of toys, shrieks of anguish ... oh, for a good book to keep the little (expletive deleted) ones quiet. Well, to start with, three from The Children's Press: for younger readers there is Tony Hickey's Granny Learns to Fly (£2.95), in which a Mary Poppins style Granny makes life magical for the O'Brien twins, Sean and Maura next there is Mary Arrigan's Landscape with Cracked Sheep (£3.95), in which 14 year old Maeve spends a summer in Galway with cousin Leo, falls for a Greek god, gets on the trail of a lost painting, writes awful - but funny - poetry, and generally manages to fill her readers with delight at her breezy and surreal lifestyle and finally we have a story set in Viking times, Robert Chatterton Newman's Murtagh the Warrior (£3.95), where the eponymous Murtagh returns from Norway to Ireland with his two friends, Brother Padraig and Donal Mor, to fight against invaders.
All three of these books are nicely presented and are superbly illustrated by the black and white drawings of Terry Myler.
Three from Wolfhound Press: The Coldest Winter, by Elizabeth Lutzeier (£3.99), is set during the Famine and tells the tale of Eamonn Kennedy and his family from the west of Ireland and their efforts to find enough money to pay their fares to the New World. The book is heavy going in its relentless depiction of the horrors of the time but with an upbeat ending that aptly illustrates the survival instincts of the human spirit in Chase the Wind (£3.99), Pat Hynes concludes his hare trilogy, the first two books of which were Land of Deep Shadow and Dawn Flight in this one the hero is Crust, who undertakes an epic quest to find kidnapped leverets and defeat the dreaded. Claydermass. I'm not an animal lover and talking hares do little for my sense of wonder, but I'm sure there's a vast reading public out there who will love it. The third offering is also an animal story. In Elsie and the Seal Boy (£3.99), Patrick O'Sullivan brings his heroine to the Kerry coastline and has her discover and help a boy who has been reared by seals.
The bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion will soon be upon us and undoubtedly there will be a surfeit of books about it. Bill Wall has got in early with his The Powder Monkey (Mercier Press, £4.99), in which young Donal Long steals a boat to escape from his violent uncle, drifts out to sea and is rescued by a British warship. He is adopted by the ship's crew and is trained as a "powder monkey", whose job it is to carry powder to the cannons. When rebellion breaks out he is caught up in a conflict of loyalties between his United Irishman father and his new found friends, and the rest of the story is taken up with how he solves his problem. The Powder Monkey is an exciting tale in itself, but it has the added attraction of being a painless way of learning about an important time in our history.
FINALLY, two offerings from an imprint new to me: Mentor Press. The Stranger and the Pooka, by Patrick Devaney (£3.99), tells how Maeve leaves Dublin for the West of Ireland to paint and to enjoy a lifestyle far away from the city's hustle and bustle. Her former life had been shadowed by a dark secret, but she soon finds that the wilderness also harbours its own enigmas, not the least of which is the presence of the Pooka, a mysterious boy who appears to her and helps her out in time of danger. Patrick Devaney writes beautifully about nature and the book has clever black and white illustrations by Don Conroy - pity about the cover, though.
And Colin Vard's Titania: The Pipes of Peace (£3.99) is a fairytale about Declan and the magic Connemara pony, Titania, and their quest to find the Pipes of Peace. Along the way they have to defeat serpents, dragons and other kinds of mythical beasts before returning safely to the mortal world. The book is illustrated by Tony Kew and is suitable for younger readers and those of a uncynical turn of mind.