Remember that millennium and the hooplah that fizzled out with the fireworks? Some looked back; others looked ahead, some with foreboding. In her latest novel, Off the Road (Puffin £3.99 in UK), Nina Bawden has been thinking her way into the new century and the future is imperfect. People now either live "Inside" in numbered districts known as Urbs or "Outside" the Wall, where barbarians roam and even the trees are feared. In Urbs Seven, where Tom lives with Mum and Dad and his grandfather, "Gandy" - "having more than one child was against the law" - clothes are "sanitised" and people are "deodorised" daily. Off the Road begins with a journey to Nostalgia Block 95, where Gandy, now 65, is to be "installed" in the Memory Theme Park where he will be "gently and permanently cared for". It tells of Gandy's escape and Tom's determination to follow his grandfather through the Wall and into a world comfortingly different.
In Bawden's urban world of 2040 children "were meant to be fat with plump arms and legs and soft wide bottoms and dimples in their chins". Children also call the shots and Oldies are expected to obey. (Heavens, the things they think up in fiction.)
Bawden's plot holds the reader - there's a kidnapping and a fine sense of surprise when Tom encounters his cousin Lizzie, extended families and an old-fashioned, rural life. Her characters are rich, interesting creations. In the end Tom is left with a complex moral choice and we admire him all the more for the decision he makes. Off the Road is exceptionally fine for the story it tells and the way it is told.
Jacqueline Wilson sells 50,000 copies of her books each month in the UK and her many young Irish fans also love her in-your-face style. Parents may think it's more up-your-nose. In The Dare Game (Doubleday, £10.99 in UK) Tracy Beaker is back: "I'm tough. As old boots. New boots. The biggest fiercest reinforced Doc Martens." Dysfunctionalism is the norm. In this new book, Tracy has left the Children's Home and is being fostered by sane and sensibly kind Cam. Tracy hates her teacher (Mrs "Vomit" Bagley) and her social worker ("Elaine the Pain"). She skips school; she steals; she waves her knickers in the air; she gives her foster mother hell. And yet Jacqueline Wilson, through her anarchic, outrageously insensitive and selfish Tracy, has her young readers realise that material possessions, false promises and designer labels are no guarantee of happiness. Tracy has no sugar-sweet conversion - "It's hateful being grateful" - but she's wiser and a little bit convincingly kinder in the end. The Dare Game looks at single parenting, irresponsibility, loneliness, the idea of home. These are complex things and there's no escaping them. Jacqueline Wilson books are deceptive, for behind the brash and sassy up-front storyline there's an insightful and honest intelligence at work.
Jean Ure's A Twist in Time (Walker, £9.99 in UK) also tells of fostering but it's a gentler, tender tale. Dad is dead, Mum is agoraphobic and in hospital with depression, and Cosy is fostered by `'Auntie and Guv". A scholarship girl, seen as a "nuisance", "nerd" and `'snobby swot ", she discovers a ghost in the old house. The Ghost Girl and Cosy write to each other and the upbeat, positive surprise ending where everything, naturally, works out for the best reinforces values which every level-headed parent would want to promote.
Carnegie Medal winner, Tim Bowler, returns to his theme of outsider in Shadows (Oxford, £3.99 in UK). Jamie, if beaten at squash, is beaten by his bullying, former-champion, exacting father: "I hit you because it'll help you". A pregnant girl is hiding in the allotment shed and two suspicious men are frequently seen in the neighbourhood. Adolescent problems abound but Bowler, with a dramatic plot culminating in a suicide, shows us Jamie surviving and coming through.
Eilis Dillon's The House on the Shore (O'Brien, £4.99) begins with a sentence to match Robert Louis Stevenson's brilliant beginning to Kidnapped : "After a night of heavy rain, I left the hut in which I had sheltered and came down the mountain at last to my uncle's house." The adventures of young Jim O'Malley in the West of Ireland have a long-ago and far-away feel to them and revolve about Jim's Uncle Martin. First published in 1955, there's a busy plot and yet the writing achieves that rare combination - it is both plain and beautiful. The Tales from . . . series has recently been reissued by Oxford paperbacks (all £4.99 in UK). Reluctant fiction readers would enjoy these short pieces that tell of animals, spells, exotic people and places: Ananse, World Champion for Greed and Fast-eating (West Africa); The Caribs, the first people on earth (West Indies); or how Wei Ku in Tales from China married a beautiful young woman whom he had tried to murder when she was a little girl. Other welcome reissues for very able young readers are Barbara Leonie Picard's brilliant retellings of The Iliad and The Odyssey (each £4.99 in UK).
Finally, Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci series - she won a 1977 Guardian Award for Charmed Life, the first in the series - has just been reissued by Collins (£4.99 each in UK). Gwendolen Chant and her brother Cat (of nine lives) are orphaned. Spells turn violin bows into large striped cats and ingredients in a bowl become a five foot monstrous spider. That and dragon's blood, broomsticks, castles and classrooms make for a magic formula. The Harry Potter books are more dizzily inventive but Wynne Jones deserves to find many new fans.
In Nina Bawden's futuristic world, books were frowned upon, "They put ideas into people's heads". Urbs, thank goodness, hasn't happened. Every book reviewed here does that magical and valuable thing: it puts ideas into people's heads!
Niall MacMonagle teaches English in Wesley College, Dublin.