Books & Poetry

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Teen novels
The Boy in the Dress
David Walliams
HarperCollins £12.99
Although the title may suggest an ‘it’s all right to be a trannie’ tale, this is no heavy-handed ‘issue’ book. Twelve-year-old Dennis enjoys a flick through a copy of Italian Vogue but he loves football, too. And if lovely Lisa, the coolest girl in the school, has a passion for fashion and wants him to try on one of her creations – and then suggests she dresses him up, takes him into school and convinces everyone in her year that he’s her French exchange student, well, it’s all a bit of fun. And everyone’s fooled – until Lisa remembers that she’s got French and, convincing as Dennis is as a girl, he’s crap at French and he’s rumbled. The illustrations are by Roald Dahl’s close collaborator Quentin Blake: appropriately, because Walliams’s storytelling has a lovely Dahlian fluency to it. There’s a similarly droll, subversive humour too – although Dahl’s bitter base note is missing – and several of the characters could have stepped out of Dahl stories, including Raj, the local shopkeeper who drives a hilariously hard bargain, and the gruff, grieving single dad who’s pretty depressing to live with but comes through for his boy when it matters. Feature continues

Just Henry
Michelle Magorian
Egmont £6.99
Deciding which films to see each week is hugely important to young Tom, the son of a World War II hero, who lives with his mother, his half-sister, his gentle stepfather and his venomous, bigoted grandmother. At school, working on a project exploring photography and the cinema, Tom is asked by his new teacher to collaborate with two boys he’s been taught by his toxic grandmother to despise: the illegitimate Pip and Jeffries, whose father was a deserter. The plot twists come thick, fast and dramatic in this novel from the author of ‘Goodnight Mister Tom’. Rich in period detail, it’s an absorbing tale – and Magorian’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the films made during the 1940s will please fellow fans.

Kaimira: Book One, the Sky Village
Monk and Nigel Ashland, with illustrations by Jeff Nentrup
Walker £6.99
A dystopian fantasy, ‘Kaimira’ is set in a world divided into three factions: humans, beasts and Meks (machines). Like Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ series, it boasts an appealingly feisty female heroine and a more thoughtful, troubled male one. One of the most seductive aspects of Pullman’s books is the settings he conjures for the adventures of his characters and – though the writing here is not in the same class – the Sky Village, a community of linked hot air balloons floating high above China, and other richly described locations, offer similarly escapist pleasures. ‘Kaimira’ ends somewhat abruptly in order to establish the opening for volume two, but it’s a satisfying read and worth considering as a present for a young reader suffering Pullman (or Potter) withdrawal symptoms.

Jackdaw Summer
David Almond
Hodder £10.99
It’s summer, the days are long and relentlessly hot and water restrictions are in force. Out exploring the Northumbrian countryside, Liam and Max encounter a jackdaw that seems to urge them to follow it to an ancient farmhouse where they discover an abandoned baby. Almond’s preoccupation with the watershed at which the happy adventuring of childhood yields to the complications of adolescence, his own boyhood, which was distinguished by the way mystery and magic seemed integrated into everyday life, and his passion for the Northumbrian landscape are all much in evidence.

Set against a background of newspaper stories of hostages seized in Baghdad and punctuated by the military planes that fly low over the landscape, drowning conversation and keeping international conflict firmly in the frame, Almond’s latest book poses many questions: about young people who are brutalised and brutal, children in care, the nature of contemporary art and the way we treat people who arrive in this country fleeing persecution. As usual, the author feels under no obligation to provide pat answers.

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