Classrooms feature big time in children's literature, from Chalet School and Malory Towers to Hogwarts and reading about school can be pleasurable for different reasons. Either we are far from the classroom when we sit down to the book or the classroom has become more strange, more unusual, more wild within the covers.
In Louis Sachar's There's A Boy In the Girls' Bathroom (Bloomsbury £4.99 in UK) fifth-grader Bradley Chalkers who "looked like a good spitter" is shunned by all, including his teacher. He is a compulsive liar, "an island" in the classroom but when he talks to his collection of animals the reader learns that he's more interesting than many a goody-twoshoes.
This novel brings you through several incidents some credible, some far-fetched: here the girl gives the boy the black eye; Bradley imagines the girls' bathroom is "carpeted in gold, with pink wallpaper and red velvet toilet seats". Bradley's relationship with his unconventional counsellor Carla is important but uneasy-making. There's an expected ending but not before the reader questions guidance given and self-help. Holes by the same author is the better book but piggybacking on Sachar's 1998 success is understandable and the UK publication of this earlier novel is well worthwhile.
Thirteen-year-old Deena Doon's school in Grandma You're Dead by Sharon O' Tai (Bloomsbury £5.99 in UK) is a more exotic school. Pupils write "their names on young green mangoes" in the schoolyard "to claim them before they turned into fragrant yellow fruits". Deena is visited by her Grandma's ghost whose husband died after a huge argument and no time to make up. "Death is no bed of roses without him" and she needs Deena's help to set things right. Tai creates a credible family set-up with Mum and Deena and brother Peter. Deena has never kissed a boy but is "so in luuurve" with Ernie and is "sick of this grandmother-ghost-thing". There's a magic realism graveyard scene and Deena creates harmony in the end.
Caroline Lawrence's The Thieves of Ostia (Orion £6.99 in UK) tells a story of Four Find-Outers and, this time, dogs. Flavia lives in the port of Ancient Rome and together with Jonathan her Jewish neighbour, Nubia, an African slave and Lupus a mute beggar boy they are determined to discover why Jonathan's dog has been gruesomely killed. The Roman house is well mapped, meals and customs and religion form a social, cultural fabric. The historical, cultural details are authentic and are handled well and they never prevent the story from racing along. Lawrence, a teacher of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, teaches admirably through her fiction. Nor does she shy away from the harsh detail of a broken-hearted father's suicide or the horrors of the slave trade. Flavia is chief detective but all four play their part. In the final page the children plan "a peaceful visit" to Pompeii in August A.D. 79 guaranteeing eager readers an explosive sequel.
With Pete Johnson's Rescuing Dad (Corgi £4.99 in UK) we're back in an up-to-the-minute world. Dad, slob of slobs, has been thrown out by an exasperated Mum but Joe and Claire want him back. Joe's voice is totally convincing: "Parents break up: that's what most of them do these days. Only not mine." Joe's friend tells him that "the present count rises dramatically when your parents separate, because they each try to out-do each other." Johnson, in this very likable book, knows the territory and the grim subject matter is threaded with humour. Dad moves out, loses his job, sells the car and gains a belly. Joe eventually takes him in hand and domesticates him. Roger, Mum's new friend, "with the personality of a cricket bat" is resisted by the scheming youngsters and though there isn't a quick-fix solution the ending shows how "adults move very slowly. But they get there in the end."
Prize-winning author Lesley Howarth never writes a negative storyline and her new novel, Ultraviolet (Puffin £4.99 in UK), though born out of the imagination of disaster tells a story of guarded optimism. "Imagine you never went to school. Never went out with your friends. Stayed home and studied on the computer. Not now and then. All the time." The story takes place decades from now and Violet sees things ("ultraviolently") before they happen. The sun, "a giant nuclear cooker converting hydrogen to helium" burns down on a world where people live underground like moles. Birdsong is no longer for real, in cyber spring summer roses bloom beside bluebells, computer games abound. This sophisticated novel is for all young computer-loving, danger-loving futurists but "coolness and greenness" at the end reassure that life does go on, "muddly, uncertain, lucky, unlucky".
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin