IT's quite a challenge to set a novel in a beehive with a cast of bees and other insects, but Soinbhe Lally has risen to it brilliantly in A Hive for the Honey-Bee (Poolbeg, £3.99). The hive is nocos, world of cute creatures. The queen establishes her reign by stinging all her rivals to death, and after being cosseted by her worker courtiers, flies out for an orgy of mid-air mating with a series of drones who all die a painful death. She then builds up the hive by laying eggs at the rate of a thousand a day.
Meanwhile the social life of the hive is full of interesting characters and quirks. There's a bunch of self-deceiving drones who think they are ruling the hive and regulating the sun, and a poetic drone called Alfred who introduces one of the workers, Thora, to the notion of delighted idleness. And there is the campaigning drone Mo, who believes in female emancipation, and tries disastrously to get the bees to negotiate peace with the wasps and the ants. There is no happy ending for the drones, who discover that even their idol, the Great Drone in the Sky, is an illusion. But the hive survives triumphant, the true hero of this most original and engaging story.
Tales of terror and mystery seem to have as much appeal as ever to young readers, so they'll be chilled and delighted by J.H. Brennan's Blood Brother (Poolbeg, £3.99). Disabled in a car accident, Sebastian is a wizard with his computer, which turns out to have strange powers. His young brother Billy needs protecting from the local hard gang, but when they start being found mutilated by rats and thrown down quarries, maybe the "protection" is getting a bit drastic. Who or what is creating the mayhem? The solution is eerie, grisly and convincing.
Two new novels bring different periods of history vividly to life. Elizabeth O'Hara's Penny-farthing Sally (Poolbeg, £3.99) is set in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Sally from Donegal is a governess in the eccentric Erikson household where she looks after ten-year-old Snow, who dislikes her odd name as much as all the white dresses her mother insists on buying her. Yeats is a family friend, and Sally goes to see one of his plays which is interrupted by protesters from the Gaelic League. Sally joins the League, learns to cycle on Mrs Erikson's old penny-far-thing bike, and meets a clerk called Thomas who becomes a rival in love to Sally's old flame back home.
The period detail is good, as it is also in Maeve Friel's The Lantern Moon (Poolbeg, £3.99). Set in early 19th-century Shropshire, it's the story of Annie and her brother William and their friend the chimney-sweep boy Sam. They live poverty-stricken lives in a town where in a local mansion the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte comes to live with his entourage in a kind of lavish house-arrest. But the three children, falsely charged with theft, take flight and are captured and brought to a prison hulk before being transported to Australia.
Maeve Friel's descriptions of the jails, the hulks, and the voyage are gruesomely convincing, and it's a welcome change when they find a happier life and an unexpected reunion in Australia.
For readers who like contemporary settings, Margrit Cruickshank's The Door (Poolbeg, £3.99) is resolutely modern, with allusions to sexual harassment, bullying, and sexism confronted by teenagers in Transition Year. It's a lively story, peppered with weird snippets of information at the start of the chapters. I'm sure that not many of us knew that Paper was invented in China about 105 AD, by Ts'ai Lun, a eunuch - the only eunuch of importance in the history of technology.