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Thursday 19 April 2018

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Children's books for the summer holidays

Weasels, road trips, and a boy with two heads: Dinah Hall picks the books to captivate children this summer.

A weasel plots world domination in Elys Dolan's new book
A weasel plots world domination in Elys Dolan's new book 

PICTURE BOOKS

Rabbits, badgers, meerkats… done to death. So yes, Weasels by Elys Dolan (Nosy Crow, £10.99) – why not? Chances are you won’t know much about what they get up to. In fact, what they do is plot world domination. The whole of human life is here in weasel form: mad scientists, health and safety officials – and the one who frets over his Starbucks order: “You know, I’m not sure about this [frothuccino]. I should have got a normal coffee.” Insanely brilliant.

In the delightful Twinkle, Twinkle, Squiglet Pig (Egmont, £10.99), Joyce Dunbar’s joy in words is matched by Tim Hopgood’s exuberant rendering of the inky marine depths inhabited by stranger-than-fiction creatures like the permanently smiling piglet squid, and the woebegone lumpfish, loosejaw and mola. Still smiling, even from inside a swallower fish’s tummy, Piglet Squid is determined to bring a grin to the faces of his unfortunate looking friends.

Don’t Spill the Milk! by Stephen Davies and Christopher Corr (Andersen, £10.99) is a riot of colour and simple emotion. Penda is taking a bowl of milk to her father in the grasslands above her African village. Past “uppy, downy dunes”, caravans of camels and giraffes stalking the plains like “aliens on a dusty moon”, she doesn’t spill a drop… until she reaches her father.

JUNIOR FICTION

There’s no pandering to political correctness in the Vitello books by Kim Fupz Aakeson and Niels Bo Bojesen (Pushkin Press, £6.99). His mother knocks back the red wine and has been known to say that a “little smack never did anyone any harm”. In Vitello Gets a Yucky Girlfriend he wrestles with the disappointment of finding the new family next door don’t conform to his ideal scenario of “at least one cool boy called Wayne or Jo” with an air rifle and ghetto blaster. Instead there’s Camilla with a crazy hamster. “I’ll just have a quick look at that crazy hamster… then I’m off.” Famous last words.

Natasha Farrant is a bit like an understudy to Hilary McKay, whose brilliant Casson Family books were clearly an inspiration for The Diaries of Bluebell Gadsby: After Iris (Faber, £6.99). Bluebell’s twin sister Iris died two years ago; her parents, displacing grief in work, abandon Bluebell and her three siblings to the care of a put-upon PhD student called Zoran. It’s a fine read – funny and moving – and a classic portrait of a family just damaged enough to be interesting.

The Boy with 2 Heads by Andy Mulligan (David Fickling, £10.99) starts with comic potential – good boy Richard wakes up one morning with a lump on his neck that rapidly grows into bad boy Rikki, the id to his ego. But while Rikki’s 11-year-old vocabulary is amusing – school uniform is “infantile, pseudo-military, identity-sapping” – the novel gets darker as Rikki starts to unleash obnoxious thoughts that verge on the sociopathic. How can you warm to a character who bullies a small disabled child, and despises fat people? It is Mulligan’s genius as a writer to weave such complex questions into what is ostensibly an oddball comedy thriller.

TEEN FICTION

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey (Penguin, £7.99) may sound like a hundred other dystopian blockbusters, but it is a cut above anything else in the genre. For a start it is well written. It is all the more terrifying that the alien invasion, which has almost wiped out humanity, does not have a face to it: just waves of mass destruction. Those, like the superbly unstereotyped heroine Cassie, who survived the power blackout, the tsunami and the pestilence have one mantra: trust no one.

Meg Rosoff’s Moose Baby (£6.99), one of Barrington Stoke’s excellent series for dyslexic teens, is a surreal story about a girl who gives birth to a moose. It’s like a curious take on Metamorphosis – but with laughs. It is full of subverted birth clichés from the midwife’s “Just look at his lovely wee hooves” to the debate over names as the teenage parents realise Isabel is not an option. “Nick stared at the furry creature in the cot. I could understand his disappointment. We’d both been convinced we were having a girl. And a human being.”

There’s something refreshingly unpretentious about starting chapters with quotes from mainstream movies instead of Milton or Saint-Exupéry. From What I Remember by Stacy Kramer and Valerie Thomas (Electric Monkey, £7.99) is an unashamed rom-com/road trip novel that plays out like a film – the ultimate beach read.

Paper Aeroplanes by Dawn O’Porter (Hot Key, £7.99) might more accurately be described as a damp bus stop read than a beach one. Set on Guernsey in the Nineties, it features dead parents, bitchy girls and disappointing sex. Nothing the average teenager wouldn’t encounter on a daily basis, in fact.

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