Stories to beguile older children — and keep them out of mischief

 
David Walliams and The Demon Dentist
28 November 2013

Don’t know about you but I’ve had my fill of the Doctor Who 50th Birthday thing. But for child addicts, the obvious book is the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Collection (Penguin, £12.99), a series of 11 stories, one for each doctor. It’s a classy line-up, including Neil Gaiman and Eoin Colfer. As Miss Jean Brodie would say, for those who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing they like.

Gaiman, the fantasy man, is, in fact, quite astonishingly prolific. It’s hard to know whether his latest, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (£16.99), is for teenagers, children or adults. Whatever; there’s an oddly dreamlike quality about this story of an unhappy boy cheered by three mysterious female neighbours at the end of his lane who are enormously old, like something out of Mary Poppins, but offer fabulous nursery food and a refuge from his family, his fears and a malign wraith. It’s a grimly convincing account of the powerlessness of children against adults in authority.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re nearly at the centenary of the start of the First World War , and children’s authors are on to it. One that my in-house reader snapped up is The Amazing Tale of Ali Pasha by Michael Foreman (Templar, £12.99), an account of Gallipoli seen from the perspective of a young recruit and his, er, tortoise. Pressed for a judgment, my reader, 10, offered, “it’s really good”. He also fell on Demon Dentist by David Walliams (HarperCollins, £12.99), a very funny account of a bad tooth fairy, but DW doesn’t need any plug from me. A good, subversive read for this age is Alex, the dog and the unopenable door by Ross Montgomery (Faber, £6.99) which has something of the fantastical quality of James Thurber about it.

There is a bit of a divide between books that I think children should like and the kind they like. And old-fashioned fairy stories are probably in the former category. Well, sod them, I say, and get a copy of The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (Hesperus, £7.99), a Victorian fantasy writer who had a big influence on CS Lewis. It has stayed with me since I first read it. Actually, check out the Hesperus imprint, which also has lovely editions of The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E Nesbit (£7.99) and The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (£12.99).

The Thirteen Days of Christmas by Jenny Overton (OUP, £6.99) is just charming, illustrated by Shirley Hughes. It’s about a family in Pepys’s time, whose eldest girl is wooed by a young merchant with a succession of presents from The Twelve Days of Christmas. Well, you can see where that’ll take you. Another festive sort of book is Christmas Poems by Gaby Morgan (Macmillan, £10,99), paired with jolly pictures by Axel Scheffler.

Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (Faber, £6.99) is enchanting too, a story by a young Fellow of All Souls about a gentleman scholar who takes in a baby girl found floating in the sea in a cello case and rears her until the social services decide to take her into care. So it’s off with the two of them to Paris in pursuit of her mother, on the rooftops of Paris. Delightful.

So too in a different way is The Knowhow Book of Spycraft: Lots of Secret Codes, Tricks and Disguises (Usborne, £5.99), a 40th anniversary edition that does what it says on the cover. For juvenile science buffs the subversively illustrated little Basher Basics Guides are brilliant. The latest, Basher Basics: Guide to Space Exploration (Kingfisher, £6), puts an awful lot of science in a fun way. I’m learning from it too.

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