Running away, ghosts, escaped prisoners, crooks, animals real and imagined, life long ago and the way we live now are familiar themes in children's literature. And how different is this spring's batch of new titles? Mobile phones are now ringing (and never irritatingly!) through the pages of many of the titles under review.
One boy and his dog is the subject of Sam Llewellyn's Wonderdog (Walker, £9.99 in UK). Set in rural Wales in an old house with wormy stairs, damp lino, spiders and mice, the family of Mam, Da, Mary, Cliff and Dai are grumpy enough to be real. Bag, from the start, "had shown himself wild and unfarmerish to a shocking degree"; and Da attempted to drown the puppy in a Kwik Save bag (hence the name). But Dai saves him and the story tells of his attempts to train Bag , "a runaway train on wheels", for the Sheepdog Trials.
There are nasty neighbours - of one we are told that "the sour fluids sloshing inside him had bleached him grey" - a great deal of muck and rain but the anti-glamorous, anti-sentimental stance is a real strength. And the mobile phone allows "red-eyed Mary with a cold as well as the blues" to connect and connive with Cad the boyfriend, whose face is "like porridge sprinkled with redcurrants".
The Roundhill (Viking, £10.99 in UK) by Dick King-Smith and Enid Richemont's To Summon a Spirit (Walker, £3.99 in UK) are similar in that they both tell of that familiar subject matter - teenagers who encounter 19th-century ghosts. In King-Smith's book, set in 1936, Evan is a 14-year-old boy with Enid Blytonish parents - bland, repressed, unaffectionate. Evan meets Alice, she of Wonderland fame, then forward to 2000 when Evan, now a grandfather, brings his grand-daughter to the very special Roundhill. Though the main character is 14 (but 1936 style), an eight-year-old Lewis Carroll fan should find it quaint and charming. Richemont's characters are more convincing, her story more challenging; Jessica's father is black and British, her mother a Liverpool redhead. They squabble, they make up, they squabble; Jessica, ill with glandular fever, imagines meeting Laetitia, a Victorian 12-year-old, and the contrast prompts a healthy feminist and revisionist outlook. Both books cleverly play with the idea of time.
Avril Rowlands's The Animals' Easter (Lion, £3.99 in UK) is a simple and successful idea. Eight animals tell of their encounter with Jesus: the donkey who bore Jesus on his back, the cat who hid beneath the table at the Last Supper, the horse carrying the Roman army officer to Golgotha. The different stories chart the last days of Jesus and young readers can easily identify with Rowlands's narrative. The worried cat notices that Jesus has washed the feet of twelve disciples but "None of his friends had thought to wash the feet of their master . . . So I put out my tongue and gently licked his dusty feet clean." My almost eight-year-old co-reader loved this one. A perfect Easter or First Communion present.
This age group will soon outgrow the need for colourful illustrations altogether and the best pictures will happen in their heads. Older child and adult alike will enjoy Perrault's Complete Fairy Tales (Puffin, £3.99 in UK), first published in French in the 17th century, and here translated into vivid, engaging versions. All the favourites are here - Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, 14 in all - and some less well-known: Ricky of the Tuft, Donkey-Skin, Princess Rosette. Fairy tales are charmingly predictable but this book proves that "Once upon a time" still works.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English in Wesley College, Dublin