Followers of boy spy Alex Rider will be scrambling to get their hands on Scorpia Rising (Walker Books £6.99), the ninth and final adventure in Anthony Horowitz's bestselling series. And why not? There's the familiar enjoyable hokum of the genre – impregnable citadels, inescapable jails, fetishistic descriptions of luxury weaponry, vehicles and consumer goods. And those whose idea of a proper villain is a heavily accented cloned albino sadist carrying a deceptively ordinary-looking walking stick and saying things like "My dear Mr Kurst…" (I may have clumped two or three of them together here) will be purring with happiness. But there are plenty of surprising wheezes and gadgets too, as Alex, now pushing 15, is brought out of retirement and flown to Egypt with his (female) carer, Jack, to fathom the newest evil doings of the Scorpia terrorist network. It's all good fun, with a nice twisting endgame, though you do wonder, amid the high gloss and ultra-digitised shenanigans, whether MI6 really still rubber-stamps its documents TOP SECRET.

I'm not a big fan of the supernatural but I was hooked by Erin Bow's superior Wood Angel (Chicken House £6.99), an authentic-feeling medieval folk story set in the damp, foresty terrain of eastern Europe. Plain Kate is the late wood carver's daughter, so precociously gifted as a whittler of good-luck charms that she is driven out of town as a suspected witch. The poor girl is adopted for her blademanship by a band of Roamers (travellers), though not before she has been persuaded by a mysterious itinerant tinker to trade her shadow for a wish that lands her with a talking cat. Yes, just the thing for an orphaned waif trying to avoid being burned at the stake. It's a fine old tale laced with superstition and fear, as outsider Kate (the mismatched eyes don't help) tries to keep faith with the the grain of her woody calling and survive the mob in a world hardened by plague, crop failure and a dreaded "sleeping death" that slides downriver in a white fog. The slow-approaching, sky-darkening showdown makes for a page-turner, but the book's great strength is Erin Bow's beautifully economic prose, layered with songs, poetic hooks and images that live long in the mind.

The pain of unbelonging – a staple theme of children's fiction – resurfaces in Katherine Rundell's The Girl Savage (Faber £6.99), which sees wild-haired tomboy Will Silver transplanted by a wicked stepmother from a carefree home in rural Zimbabwe to a posh London boarding school. The two sides of her coin are nicely polished: Africa with its laughter-filled hours of bareback horseriding and falling out of mango trees; school with its strange customs of having to do maths and eat with cutlery. But events beyond these rather too Manichean contrasts – abscondment, sleeping rough and more opportunities for scuffed knees – lack real development or resolution.

I enjoyed Candy Gourlay's Tall Story (David Fickling Books £5.99), which is about a giraffe-sized Filipino boy coming to join his mum and half-sister in Britain. You might guess that basketball is involved, though I did groan a bit at yet another girl with a boy's name (Andi), not to mention another misfit, another new school, another deceased father. But the author makes the most of familiar ingredients, in particular a menacing subplot turning on Filipino culture and myth. The short chapters, alternating between the two odd siblings, are perfect for the bus.