How much reality should young people be exposed to? It’s a dilemma parents, educators and children’s authors grapple with constantly, as that reality grows ever harder to justify: environmental hooliganism, man’s inhumanity to man. A selection of this summer’s middle years books tackle everything from wildlife crime to humanitarian crises via the fear of nightfall. The bar seems to be shifting in terms of what a key stage 2 can handle.
Just on the right side of quite scary is The Switching Hour by newcomer Damaris Young (Scholastic, August), who grew up in Africa and rewrites that landscape into a quasi-magic realist realm full of marauding “daggertooths” and starving “wrathclaws” and, just out of shot, the climate crisis. Drought and tragedy stalk a close-knit community. Plucky young Amaya and her pet goat, Tau, are in charge of Amaya’s toddler brother, Kaleb, who goes missing one night. A fantastical creature roams the darkness: the shape-shifting Badoko, who steals children and feeds on their dreams. Thrills and spills follow as Amaya – just one of three strong female characters in this atmospheric adventure powered by love and loyalty – goes in search of the sibling she vowed to protect.
Real-life strong females are legion in Raj Kaur Khaira’s nonfiction compendium, Stories for South Asian Super Girls (Kashi House, proceeds to women and children’s charities, out now). Like Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls gone intersectional, this inspirational rogues’ gallery is bang up to date. Beauty entrepreneurs line up with labour rights activists; Bake Off’s Nadiya Hussain grins at The Office’s Mindy Kaling. This call to courage celebrates warrior queens of Bangladeshi, Indian, Nepalese and Pakistani heritage. Inevitably, in doing so, it highlights a morass of injustice – sexism, homophobia, the abuse of power – but in matter-of-fact language designed to highlight obstacles overcome.
Curbing outrages by the powerful is a concern never far away from the keyboard of Florida’s Carl Hiassen, the bestselling author for grownups, who turned his attention to kids’ lit in 2002 with Hoot. His 2018 middle-years novel Squirm – just out in paperback (Pan Macmillan) – makes fantastic holiday reading, or essential packing, if you’re camping in rattlesnake country.
Wisecracking Billy Dickens is a young snake handler: they’re surprisingly useful when dealing with bullies, he finds. All Billy wants, though, is answers: what does his mysterious father do for a living, and why did he leave? He soon finds himself enmeshed in drama both animal and human while on the hunt for a cigar-chomping big game hunter keen to hasten endangered species into extinction.
A burning sense of injustice propels the latest book by the excellent, multiple award-winning Katherine Rundell, set in prohibition-era New York. Circus folk and light-fingered domestics come up against the mafia as young Vita Marlowe, fresh off the boat from England, tries to right a wrong: her grandfather’s crumbling ancestral pile has been swindled from him by a rapacious businessman. One of the consolations of crime fiction is the tidy closure they provide, and The Good Thieves (Bloomsbury, out now) ties up every single moral loose end expertly.
Adam Baron is another writer for adults who came up with a great first outing in Boy Underwater (2018). You Won’t Believe This (HarperCollins) is the sequel, once again featuring Charlton Athletic-mad Cymbeline Igloo and his cast of south London friends.
Boy Underwater handled a mystery within a mental health crisis with lashings of humour. This time around, multiple conundrums abound: who is bullying the best teacher in the school, a former Botswanan Olympian? And why has Veronique’s ancient, mysterious Chinese grandma, Nanai, stopped eating? As before, this gripping novel unfolds with the deftness of a thriller but stars a totally believable kid who hates dal and apostrophes. Moreover, Baron nails the right of children to know what kind of a world their parents have created. “For a second I wondered if Veronique and I should hear what happened next – weren’t we too young?” wonders our year-four hero. “But these things happen to kids younger than us, how could it be wrong for us to know them?”
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