It is February 29th, the auspicious 12th birthday of Elle Bibi-Imbele Ifie, who is about to graduate to 3-Leap at Intercalary International. Elle is a Leapling with a special gift, which will enable her, literally, to leap into the future. Patience Agbabi’s The Infinite (Canongate, £6.99, 10+) tells the story of Elle’s journey beyond the present, to the Time Squad Centre, where she can explore the possibilities of her time-travelling talents.
Elle, however, is not just an ordinary bisextile, she has “specialist needs”: sensory sensitivities and food preferences that suggest the autism spectrum, although that word is never used. These sensitivities inhibit her occasionally in certain situations, but they also enhance her ability to respond to a crisis, borne out as Patience Agbabi’s plot barrels along. As children’s publishing continues to call for and celebrate diversity, Elle is a champion of difference on a variety of levels, and her personal triumph will root the narrative in the reader’s mind long after the closing pages.
Another remarkable hero
Dirk Dilly, the titular hero of Gareth P. Jones's Dragon Detective: Catnapped (Stripes, £6.99, 8+), is another remarkable hero. An established private investigator in the bustling metropolis of London, he is also a dragon – "a four-metre-long, red-backed, green-bellied, urban-based Mountain Dragon", to be exact – not quite the kind of creature you would expect to be sneaking around the city solving crimes. It turns out, you see, that there are dragons all over London – Sea Dragons, Mountain Dragons; all dragons are not the same you know – and they just might be responsible for the disappearance of London's feline population.
Jones’s comic mystery plays upon the natural conundrums a dragon might encounter when trying to do what humans do, reflected in Scott Brown’s art design (scorched pages anyone?). The fantasy is given a real-life edge when a young girl, Holly, tracks him down in pursuit of her own feline friend and they strike up a surprisingly productive friendship, which readers can follow in three sequential adventures.
Train mystery
It is jewellery that goes missing in M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman's The Highland Falcon Thief (Macmillan, £6.99, 8+); jewels belonging to Lady Lansbury, one of the elite passengers on the Highland Falcon, an historic steam engine making a royal tour around England with some of the country's noblest citizens and amoral celebrities on board. Harrison Beck is chaperoning his eccentric journalist uncle, Nat. However, he doesn't really want to be on the train, nor should he be; children are barred. When Hal meets a real child stowaway, plucky Marlene Singh, the train driver's daughter, he finds a perfect partner to help solve the crime.
The confined space of the train and its finite journey lends a great urgency to Leonard and Sedgman’s plot, which they deliver with pacy skill, never forgetting the penchant of certain young readers for train trivia. Locomotive lovers have also been promised several more instalments of Adventures on Trains, as Harrison and his uncle travel across the world’s greatest railways.
Search-and-find book
The reader becomes a detective of sorts as they turn the pages in Kristin Roskifte's Everybody Counts (Wide Eyed, £12.99, 5+). This original counting, search-and-find book uses pictures to create a visual history of the world, from the individual ("One person . . . lying in bed counting his heartbeats . . . wondering how many people are looking at the same stars right now") to the mass of humanity ("Seven and a half billion people on the same planet. Every single one of them has their own unique story"). Roskifte's loose impressionistic narrative offers a series of characters who we can follow across the pages, as they experience disappointment and joy, take part in sporting occasions and festivities.
The all-encompassing thematic approach takes concrete shape in a riot of colour and detail that celebrates all ethnicities and creeds, making it a brilliant busy book for the reader drawn to graphic material more than the text.
Picture story
Yoko Tanaka's wordless Dandelion's Dream (Walker, £12.99, 3+) relies entirely on pictures to tell its story, of a dandelion in a flower-budding field that blooms into a real lion instead. As seeds take flight across the sky, Dandelion follows their pollen trail. She takes a ride upon a steam train and shelters under the wing of a seagull, before journeying across the sea to the city where her beauty goes unnoticed.
A trip to the cinema translates into a plane ride, puncturing our suspension of disbelief and bringing Dandelion back to earth again, where her thick yellow mane becomes the soft puffball of a dandelion about to spread its own seeds. Using a soft palette of greys and yellow, Tanaka’s surreal narrative is exquisitely rendered in soft-focused paintings. Dandelion’s Dream is one of the most beautiful books you will see this spring.
Changing seasons
Noelle Smit's gorgeous picturebook In the Garden (Little Island, £12.99, 3+) will help you chart the seasons changing, as the first budding crocuses peep their heads above the soil. The book maps out a year in the garden, following a community as they tend to its seasonal needs, sowing seeds in spring and harvesting at Halloween. Smit's highly detailed, boldly coloured drawings have an immediate impact, and the gradual extension of the cast of characters as the year moves on – from a single family to an entire community – provides an extra layer of spirit to the book, drawing subtle attention to the relationship between the land and the food we eat, and the relationships – and joy – created in the process.
