The last children’s book roundup of the year boasts some tinglingly good titles and last-minute gifts, many with voyage themes to carry us onwards into 2021.
For Whovians of nine-plus, Dave Rudden’s The Wintertime Paradox (BBC Children’s) is a gorgeous anthology of Christmas-themed stories with the unpredictable flair of the Tardis itself. Encompassing terrors from Plasmavores to Autons, and with appearances from River Song and Davros, it’s full of delicious fear and complex emotion conveyed in Rudden’s trademark bell-clear prose. Alexis Snell’s linocuts amplify both tenderness and threat.
A Clock of Stars: The Shadow Moth (HarperCollins) is a sparkling debut from Francesca Gibbons, with Chris Riddell’s charismatic illustrations. When Imogen and her little sister Marie follow a silver moth through a door in a tree, they find themselves in an enchanted kingdom. With the help of spoiled Prince Miro, can the sisters reconcile the beleaguered inhabitants with their enemies, the fearsome skret monsters, and find their way home again? Gibbons’s first book boasts a funny, engaging voice, a strong sibling dynamic and a bold, intransigent heroine.
Benjamin Zephaniah’s Windrush Child (Scholastic) is based around a very different journey. As Zephaniah says: “I like my fiction to be true.” The story of Leonard, who sails from Jamaica to England to join his parents in making a new life – only to be treated as disposable once he has adapted, grown up, married and grown old in the “mother country” – rings with cogent, clarion truth.
For (sophisticated) readers of seven-plus, there’s yet another journey in Peter van den Ende’s The Wanderer (Pushkin), a wordless picture book filled with intricate, transporting, textured monochrome detail. A paper boat sets out to sea on a voyage encountering every kind of fearsome, beautiful marine creature, as well as ships, starlight and threatening strangers, in its quest to find safe harbour. This is a book to get lost in.
From Nicholas O’Neill and Susan Hayes, and illustrated by Ruby Taylor, Music: A Fold-Out Graphic History (What on Earth) is a glorious concertina of music history from the earliest gourd instruments right up to AI composers – wide-ranging, colourful and absorbing.
Warmly loving and evocative, for about five and up, Chitra Soundar’s Sona Sharma, Very Best Big Sister (Walker) is a tender series of stories about Sona, unsure about sharing her parents when her baby sibling is born, and her delightful extended family, brought to life by Jen Khatun’s gentle images.
In picture books, Floella Benjamin’s superb autobiography Coming to England (Macmillan) is condensed for younger children and made still more accessible by Diane Ewen’s lively illustrations. When Floella and her siblings follow her parents from Trinidad to Britain, they hope the Queen will be there to meet them – but their welcome is colder than expected. Gradually, they settle in, until one day Floella really does meet the Queen. Clear and direct, the book conveys some big, challenging ideas with assurance.
Picture book doyenne Shirley Hughes returns to one of her best loved characters in Dogger’s Christmas (Penguin), in which the titular scruffy toy looks on as Dave and his family prepare for Christmas – and then is lost in the joyous upheaval. Will he be found again? Forty years after Dogger’s first appearance, Hughes’s unimpeachable gift for observing and communicating the small, warm joys of children’s domestic life remains as strong as ever.
Finally, from the zanier end of the festive spectrum comes Alex T Smith’s retelling of The Twelve Days of Christmas (Macmillan). On the first day of Christmas, Grandma gives the traditional gifts – by the seventh, though, some rogue snorkelling squirrels have made an appearance. Splendidly silly pictures, packed with sly detail and anarchic humour, build up to a hilarious dead-stop punchline.
Teenagers roundup
Love Frankie
by Jacqueline Wilson, Doubleday Children’s, £12.99
The inimitably readable Jacqueline Wilson, who came out herself earlier this year, presents her first gentle foray into gay romance for younger teens (with a gorgeous Pride-flag striped cover beneath the jacket). 13-year-old Frankie is worried and angry – her father has left, her mother’s MS has relapsed, and popular, pretty Sally won’t stop bullying her at school. But when Sally shows a different side, Frankie is drawn to her in an unfamiliar way. Acute, poignant, funny and sweet, full of the resonant detail and assured characterisation for which she is loved, this is Wilson at her best.
The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea
by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Walker, £7.99
When she won her berth on the pirate ship Dove, Flora became Florian; Florian who stays safe, keeps his head down and earns his ferocious crewmates’ respect. The Dove enslaves its passengers, but Florian doesn’t permit himself to care about their fate – until the courageous, outrageous Lady Evelyn Hasegawa boards the ship on her way to an arranged marriage, and, unexpectedly, Florian falls in love. Bloody, poetic, rich with pirate politics, captured mermaids and a witch who wields the magic of stories, Tokuda-Hall’s debut is original, satisfying and romantic – a swashbuckler with great imagination and emotional depth.
The Cousins
by Karen M McManus, Penguin, £7.99
Brought up in luxury on their island off the east coast of America, the three Story children led charmed lives until their mother cut them off with a cryptic note, reading simply: “You know what you did.” A generation on, and the banished siblings’ children, 18-year-old cousins Aubrey, Milly and Jonah, are urgently invited to the island by their grandmother. What does she want from them – and what will happen if they pry into the family mystery? Not quite as unpredictable as McManus’s debut thriller One of Us Is Lying, but still a highly readable Christmas treat.
