PRE-TEEN: AGE 9-12: PITY THE PRE-TEENS. They will have to clean up the fine economic mess the country is in and sort out global warming and resource shortages.
To make matters worse – in order to make them better – they have to read about all this misery. Partly to equip them for what lies ahead; partly – can you credit? – for enjoyment. The least we owe them is a decent fiction otherworld, but too often they are fobbed off with trivia. Not in this book-feast, though.
Kate Thompson is at her scintillating best with The White Horse Trick(Bodley Head, £12.99). This, the concluding part of the New Policeman trilogy, fast-forwards to the end of this century, when global warming and squandered resources (sound familiar?) have turned Ireland into a gloomy, soggy desert. Tír na nÓg is endangered because mutinous immigrant Irish hordes pour in, laden with the shards of their dead culture: sheet music and the like. This is a familiar Thompson world of fickle, foolish gods, shape-changing and easy passage across the timeskin. Much wit and banter animate this all-too-realistic fantasy that ends with a beginning – no, not of a sequel, but of an age-old story of origins.
Philip Reeve's No Such Thing as Dragons(Scholastic £9.99) travels back to a medieval period when dragons haunted isolated villages and unscrupulous men preyed on villagers' fears. Ansel, a mute boy, is sold to Brock, who claims he can slay dragons and allay superstitions. Brock is convinced dragons don't exist, and has arguments to prove it. The pair team up with self-serving Friar Flegel and the abandoned Else, and discover how wrong Brock was. What ensues is no straightforward battle between good and evil, but an ethical awakening. And because this is fiction, the good survive and almost prosper.
Sally Prue's Wheels of War(Oxford Children's Books, £5.99) evokes the lure, the sickly pleasure and the horror of war, and the breakdown of civility in a household in 1819 after the Peterloo massacre. The master retreats into a twilight world, servant George enthusiastically enrolls in the army, paying the price with his humanity, and young Will must care for everyone, including Rosie, George's sweetheart. Prue never descends into cheap sentiment; neither does she linger on the gore that spatters the pages. The master's kaleidoscope refracts the story's light: its coloured patterns beguile but make no sense. Who wins in this brilliant cautionary tale? No one, really; the most flexible adapt. That's all.
Mary Arrigan always keeps her readers agog with cracking adventures, and here she moves confidently into historical fiction. Esty's Gold(Francis Lincoln, £6.99) uproots a middlesman's daughter from famine-ravaged Ireland and follows her, first as she endures the humiliation of domestic service, then the trials of frontier Australia. Esty learns solid bourgeois values – self-reliance, initiative and hard work – and Grandfather teaches civility to immigrant children. All ends happily in a colonial parlour adorned with a mirrored sideboard, just like the one back home.
Jacqueline Wilson's stories are familiar friends: chatty, comfortable, putting readers at ease despite their grim subject matter. Hetty Feather(Doubleday, £12.99), set, uncharacteristically for Wilson, in 1876, features a needy, wilful child with an operatic imagination and hard lessons to learn. Hunger, punishment and even death wander the pages. But so do the haphazard kindnesses that make life endurable, coming from those as misfortunate as Hetty. Mostly, her elders aren't her betters. Wilson doesn't mince her words: she made her name with contemporary tales of broken and open families, and here she revives a familiar storyline for millennium babies.
Just now little princesses in Ireland, like Sara Crewe in Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic A Little Princess, are discovering that daddies' diamond mines have turned to dust. Sara inhabited a story, so her diamond mine revived. But whatever happened to her fellow pupils in Miss Minchin's select Victorian seminary for young ladies after she blazed away? Miss Minchin preferred "detached" parents who did not check closely on their children. Hilary McKay sets about letting us into the seminary's secrets in Wishing for Tomorrow(Hodder, £10.99). Life continues, pretty lonely and mainly uneventful, for faithful Ermengarde, little Lottie, Lavinia and Melchisedec, the pet rat, but there is a fairy-godmother ending. Burnett's fans won't be disappointed.
After cautionary ecotales and virtuous Victoriana, youngsters might relish some light-hearted trivia, and AJ Healy's blockbuster has just that. Tommy Storm and the Galactic Knights(Quercus, £6.99) is a sequel (but of course) to Tommy Storm, and its narrator helpfully advises readers that they can skip the generous footnotes and information boxes. The book is crammed with characters with names such as A-Sad-Bin-Liner and the kind of smart-alec ripostes, puns (there's a Straddlevarious violin) and exclamations that many youngsters find hilarious. You will get the drift if I tell you that Tommy and Co outwit a monster and mount an offensive against chocolate terrorists to save the universe.
Gennifer Choldenko, author of Al Capone Shines My Shoes(Bloomsbury, £6.99), politely thanks teachers for using her novel in schools, and acknowledges an "ex-bank robber" for confiding "what it was like to be behind bars in Alcatraz". This historical novel is set in 1935 on that prison island, as was its prequel, Al Capone Cleans My Shoes, and you really need to have read that to enjoy this: the scourge of sequels strikes again. The story dangles on a neat ethical noose. Al Capone got young Moose's autistic sister, Natalie, into a special school, and now Capone wants a favour in return.
And so Moose finds himself on the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire – or so it seems. Another kind of global warming.
Mary Shine Thompson is dean of research and humanities at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. Her last book isThe Fire i' the Flint: Essays on the Creative Imagination (Four Courts Press, 2009)
