Children’s book reviews: a trio of compelling stories

We may be only a couple of weeks into 2016 but already the new year’s children’s and young-adult books are beginning to accumulate. Before some of the most interesting of these line up for review in future columns, however, there are at least three titles published last year that continue to provide engaging and stimulating reading. Their themes, though familiar, are handled in an appealingly fresh manner, the stories they have to tell constitute compelling narratives and the quality of the writing is uniformly impressive.

The most original of the trio is Kwame Alexander's Crossover (Andersen Press, £7.99), its merits recognised by the fact that since publication it has won the Newbery Medal, America's most prestigious children's book award. Written throughout in a form of free verse that can only be described as mesmerising, Crossover is set in the world of young American basketball. The central characters are 12-year-old twins, Josh and Jordan, both star players of the game at the school where their mother is a teacher. Their father, in his day, had also excelled at the sport though now his health would seem to be giving cause for concern.

The inter-relationships between the various members of the family unit are excellently observed and portrayed, particularly when the first signs of strain and tension begin to appear. It is here that Alexander’s skill in employing his free verse to switch tonally between moods of exhilaration and despair is most in evidence. Josh, as narrator, moves adroitly from one register to another (often with hilarious consequences), even managing to incorporate borrowings from the idiom of rap and hip hop. It all amounts to a beautifully constructed and powerfully emotional novel. Try reading it aloud.

Titular heroes

While there are certainly challenging moments in the lives of Josh and Jordan, they could easily be considered relatively insignificant if placed beside those experienced by the nine-year-old titular heroes of Aharon Appelfeld's Adam & Thomas (Seven Stories Press, £12.99).

One of the most poignant additions to the extensive body of children’s literature dealing with the second World War, this is an absorbing story of determination and initiative. Left to fend for themselves in a forest, the two Jewish boys may have escaped the terrors of the ghetto but the sounds of warfare and persecution are never far away. The life they manage to create for themselves as the days, weeks and months pass brings with it developments that border on the miraculous and give their story the aura of fable and folk-tale.

Translated by Jeffrey M Green from the original Hebrew, the book’s most beguiling appeal lies in its subtle differentiation of the two boys. If at times they talk and behave as “ordinary” nine-year-old boys might do in a similar situation, they also, more typically, are given to societal, philosophical and religious observations. In their own oblique way, the boys are offering a commentary on the horrors unfolding in the wider Europe around them but it is a commentary which offers no facile explanations, often delivered with the candour and openness that characterises true friendship. Scattered throughout the text, the illustrations of Philippe Dumas convey both the delicate beauty of forest existence and its omnipresent fragility.

Richness

Winner of a number of awards for some of her earlier children's and young-adult novels such as Maggot Moon and I, Coriander, Sally Gardner is back on top form with The Door That Led To Where (Hot Key Books, £6.99), now available in paperback. In the simplest of classifications this would qualify as a "time slip" novel, though such a reductive description does little to convey its richness and variety as it moves effortlessly between two Londons: the city in its contemporary guise and the re-imagined city of 1830.

Providing the link between the two is 16-year-old AJ Flynn, son of a feckless and abusive mother, disenchanted with school and examinations and, it would seem, destined for the scrapheap that Slim, one of his friends, describes as “the electronic jungle of despair”.

He is rescued from such a fate when, unexpectedly perhaps, he finds a job as an apprentice clerk in a law firm, but rather than offering a way out of his situation it is merely the prelude to a sequence of events that see him take a step back in time to a London strongly redolent of a Victorian novel (AJ, we have been told earlier, had always been a reader with a particular fondness for Dickens, a fondness Gardner clearly shares).

The transition between the boy’s two environments is facilitated by his finding of a key, curiously bearing his name, in the archives of his new employer. Where is the door the key will fit, will he find it and what lies beyond it?

The answers to these questions provide the opportunity for a narrative which, its slow start notwithstanding, is typified by its liveliness, both in its complex plotting and the diversity of its huge cast.

What emerges most strongly from this impressive combination is a sense that, in spite of their obvious differences, AJ’s two worlds have much on common, not least in the way in which, too quickly, they are prone to dismiss those often labelled recalcitrant misfits.