FICTION AGES 9-12:Orphans and alleyways shape this literary landscape, writes Victoria White
WHY ARE the children in these books so often orphans? Because being orphaned is a child's greatest fear, so that stories of surviving it are necessary to them? Or because they often feel like orphans even if they have parents?
It's probably a bit of both. Little Orphan Annie, and Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery's original classic, are two of the most famous, still tugging our heartstrings 100 years on. Puffin saw an opportunity in the centenary of Anne of Green Gables and commissioned a "prequel", Before Green Gables, by Budge Wilson (£9.99), aimed at jerking our few remaining tears with the story of the death of Anne's parents and her various sad servitudes.
But does Annie crumble? No, siree! And does the reader? Yes, I'm afraid so. Wilson has cleverly moved the language up to date while staying within the original idiom. She is just as cloying as Montgomery and just as class-conscious - little Annie is a potential schoolteacher struggling to get out of an uneducated slattern.
A story only gets to be a children's classic if it tells a story that children need: Green Gables is one of them, and Before Green Gables works the same magic. My nine-year-old boy picked through the books, chose it and disappeared with it.
Mark Barratt's Joe Rat (Red Fox, £5.99) tells a far more savage story of an orphan boy who survives by picking through the sewers of Victorian London. His friend Bess is not an orphan but she might as well be. The most shocking moment in the story is when Bess's jealous mother dolls her daughter up in red ribbons and blusher and tries to sell her into prostitution.
The story is so carefully phrased that children of about 12 and more would understand from this only what they understand already. All would react with glee when Bess jumps from the cart and runs away, disappearing alone down London's streets.
The book takes from the structure of Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, though of course there are no stepmothers - real mothers are more terrifying. The army of children is controlled by a huge woman called Mother who rarely moves from a huge bed swarming with white mice. This is such a superb book that you have to forgive Barratt his far reaches of implausibility, just as you forgive them of Dickens.
Stanley Buggles's orphanhood in The Darkling Curse, by Chris Mould (Hodder, £6.99), is rather different. He finds himself the heir to a huge estate with a staff of servants until a ghastly family of imposters try to claim it. It's a great story, well told, but this latest chapter in the Something Wickedly Weird series is short and slight and rigidly tailored to the demands of the market.
Miles Wednesday is an orphan too, but accompanied by his own angel in Dubliner Jon Berkeley's The Tiger's Egg (Simon and Schuster, £6.99). But there is nothing urgent in Miles's quest to find his father and the picaresque tale, the second in a series,did not hold this reader.
It is interesting how children love discrete fantasy worlds - is it because they can be known and controlled with magic, attractive to the powerless? But for this reader there must be tension and a connection between fantasy and reality, as in Pullman and Rowling, for the story to grip.
The latest in The Truth Sayer series, March of the Owlmen, by Sally Prue (Oxford, £5.99), is firmly set in fantasy, chronicling an attack on the House of Truth by a mysterious enemy. Hootcat Hill by Lucy Coats (Orion, £9.99) has a wonderful heroine in Linnet Perry, with her red hair, different coloured eyes and dyslexia, and she has come to save the world from the, ahem, "wyrm". But the whole story is smattered with bits of fake Olde Englishe and bits of Gaelic to make it magical and "other" in a way that to this reader is simply irritating.
Good old historical war books are still with us. Blue Flame, by KM Grant (£9.99), is the first in a trilogy set during the crusades, while L Brittney's latest in the Nathan Fox series, Traitor's Gold (Macmillan, £5.99) is set during the fascinating struggle between the British and Spanish empires in the 16th century.
But Dusk, by Kenneth Oppel (Faber, £6.99), is a historical novel set in rather more ancient times, among the dinosaurs at a critical point of evolution. He brilliantly succeeds in making us chummy with a family of chiropters, who can only glide, and then thrills us when young Dusk suddenly learns to fly. Crucially his father, a truly great leader, understands that evolution is necessary to our survival. The suggestion that we might be at another evolutionary cross-roads as we struggle to cope with a new environment does not need to be spelled out.
This environmental theme runs strong in children's fiction, and never stronger than in Timothee de Fombelle's Toby Alone (Walker, £9.99), already a cult book in France. Set among tiny people whose tree is their whole world, it tells of Toby's struggle after his scientist father dares to tell the tree people that they should not exploit all their "crude sap" or the tree will die. Beautifully illustrated with line drawings by François Place, it shows children's fiction still holds strong as a subversive subgenre in which terrible truths are told.
Victoria White is an author and journalist