This year, children’s fiction hailed a new superhero in the form of Charles III, who starred in a deluge of picture books to mark his Coronation. Some were dramatic. In The King’s Pants by Nicholas Allan (Andersen, £7.99), a Royal Mail blunder results in the loss of the Coronation underwear, threatening to sabotage the big day. Events take a similarly uneasy turn in The King’s Runaway Crown (OUP, £7.99) by Rosalind Spark, in which His Majesty’s Jack Russell absconds with the crown on the morning of the Coronation.
In a similarly mischievous vein, Three Little Monkeys and the Grand Hotel (Harper Collins, £12.99) is the latest instalment in the series by Quentin Blake and Emma Chichester Clark. It sees Hilda Snibbs’s pets on reliable form, causing the head waiter to faint into the raspberry mousse. For any toddlers wanting to ponder life’s bigger conundrums, Begin Again by Oliver Jeffers (Harper Collins, £20) tells the story of the human race in 112 pages, with such meaty questions as “Where did we begin?” and “Where are we going?”
Fantasy remains a dominant theme in children’s books, with some sumptuous reworkings of the classics. Saving Neverland (Puffin, £14.99) is Abi Elphinstone’s reimagining of Peter Pan: two children living in a flat in the old Darling family home in Bloomsbury come to the aid of a cursed Neverland. Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge (Two Hoots, £14.99), meanwhile, looks like a picture book, but don’t be deceived: this illustrated fantasy, aimed at readers aged 12 and over, tells the eerie story of a boy’s quest to save an island cursed by the souls of the dead: “Even the sight of them could kill.”
In The Snow Girl (Usborne, £12.99), Sophie Anderson draws on familiar fantasy tropes to tell the beautifully imagined story of a child’s adventures with a girl made of snow. (“I wish the snow girl would come to life. Then I would have a friend, a real friend I could trust.”) Ghostlord (Little Island, £8.99) is the second instalment in Philip Womack’s thrilling Wildlord trilogy. This time, the heroine is a teenage girl who fights to free the ghost of a young boy imprisoned for 500 years by a necromancer. And for slightly older readers, Katherine Rundell offered the stunning Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her latest adventure, about a boy who visits his grandfather in Scotland and discovers a magical archipelago, “a land where all the creatures of myth still live and thrive”.
