In some children’s books, nothing much happens. In Roberto Piumini’s Glowrushes (Pushkin Press, £9.99), it’s like this: a father, a great Turkish lord, hires an artist to paint his sick son’s rooms for his 11th birthday, and together the boy and the painter create walls of wondrous imaginary landscapes. It turns out that you don’t have to travel outside your own room to inhabit new worlds. One wall is for the meadows of a goatherd, with tiny red goats, a lame dog and a distant minaret and a muezzin with a big nose. Another is for a besieged castle with a lovely princess atop a tower. And one room has glowrushes, wheat grasses which shine in the dark. It’s hard to say what age this story is meant for, but it reminds me of The Little Prince, where everything has its own logic.
Plenty happens in Gill Lewis’s Moon Flight (David Fickling Books, £7.99), a departure from her usual stories grounded in the natural world. It’s about a dockland rat called Tilbury, the seventh ratling of a seventh litter – and you know what that means. His thirst for adventure takes him on a quest to return the rats’ great stolen diamond, the Cursed Night, to its rightful owners. With his clever sister Nimble Quick, he braves endless dangers to find the Golden Rats, only to discover trickery and betrayal, from which they escape in a flying machine. It’s a cracker of a story, with characters no less feisty for being rats and with a lot to say about our capacity for being deceived by appearances. A moral tale with rodents: genius.
Jon Klassen is a sublime storyteller and illustrator, and his latest, The Skull (Walker, £14.99), is a haunting story about a little girl called Otilla who is running through the woods (we never do find out from what or whom) and finds a house where a skull in the window gives her shelter. The skull can’t take tea in front of the fire any more, but the little girl helps it try. And when a headless skeleton comes looking for the skull in the night, it is the intrepid girl who challenges it. The simple, sombre illustrations conjure up everything the deadpan prose doesn’t say. Based on a folk tale Klassen found in Alaska and reworked, it is captivating.
There’s a welcome reissue by Harper-Collins of Diana Wynne Jones’s brilliant Howl stories (all £7.99), starting with Howl’s Moving Castle about the adventures of a castle which can’t keep still, a fire demon who moves it, a young witch called Sophie and an egotistical magician called Howl. It’s followed by House of Many Ways, in which a baker’s daughter who is both very greedy and fond of books rescues a beleaguered king from his monstrous enemies. Castle in the Air finds the castle accommodating a djinn, his brother and 40 princesses, pursued by a carpet-seller, a magic carpet and a soldier of fortune.
Wynne Jones’s imagination was so fertile and generous it’s hard to keep up, but it was a blessed relief to abandon several contemporary children’s books for this riot of plot and character, illustrated with brio by Tim Stevens. The Folio Society has reissued the first of her Chrestomanci books, Charmed Life, in a handsome edition illustrated by Alison Bryant (£44.95). It’s always a good sign when an author dispenses with parents early on, and Wynne Jones does so on the first page, when they perish on a day trip in a paddle steamer, leaving the field to the narrator Cat, his witch sister Gwendolen and the great magician Chrestomanci. And, yes, in some ways it anticipates Harry Potter.
A book I cheerfully discarded for Wynne Jones was Tyger by S.F. Said (David Fickling Books, £7.99), which comes with plaudits from greats such as Frank Coterell Boyce and Jacqueline Wilson. It’s hard to see why, unless it’s to demonstrate political credentials. It’s set in a London where immigrants live in a ghetto; outside, the gallows is going strong at Tyburn, where a band plays ‘Rule Britannia’. Enclosures are still under way, and there’s a special street lane for lords and ladies. Said is plainly free to conjure up a fantasy of white, imperial England, and the reader is equally free to give this shoddy caricature a miss.
Tom Holland is a historian, and his fiction is steeped in history. In The Wolf Girl, the Greeks and the Gods (Walker, £25), illustrated in antique style by Jason Cockcroft, he combines real events – the war of Athens and Sparta against Persia – with the gods and creatures who peopled that world. The heroine is Gorga, a Spartan princess who did exist. But the boundaries between gods and men are permeable, and the little princess belongs to a world where she sees Artemis hunting with her maidens, her father turns at will into a wolf, and the Persians are terrible because they, like she, are descended from Zeus. It’s gripping, being real and not-real and, as Holland reflects, the war it describes was the greatest episode in history.
Katherine Rundell needs no introduction (and if you haven’t read Rooftoppers, you’re missing a treat). Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury, £14.99) is a departure from her usual heightened, richly embroidered reality. This is an encounter between a girl who can fly and who inhabits a world where mythological beasts exist (though they’re not flourishing) and an unhappy boy who lives with his reclusive grandfather, right at the point where our world and the girl’s come together. It would be a hard-hearted reader who didn’t take to a book with a young griffin, a flying coat and an evil threat to the ecosystem at the heart of a labyrinth. Funnily, though, it feels less engaging than Rundell’s other books, precisely because anything can happen, so there are too few constraints.
In Philip Reeve’s bravura fantasy Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time (David Fickling Books, £7.99), Utterly, whom we’ve met before, travels from 1812 with her mother, a sea goddess, to the 1970s, pursued by a mad scientist and aided by her friend Egg. It’s hard to do justice to Reeve’s gripping storytelling.
Brian O’Conaghan’s Treacle Town (Andersen Press, £8.99) is as far from fantasy as it’s possible to get, for we start and finish with a gang murder. This story is about thwarted opportunities, the fellowship of losers who shoplift and get high together, and the hopelessness of life in a part of Glasgow from which real work (and the public library) departed long ago. The language is part Train-spotters, part Derry Girls (this is Celtic territory). It’s often funny, often savagely bitter, and is a gripping account of what it’s like to live on the margins.
