Children's Literature: Orna Mulchay on books for 10-12 year-olds.
Siobhán Parkinson's Something Invisible (Puffin, £4.99) is a book that steals up on you. Though the opening pages hint at something terrible to come, for chapters on end nothing particular happens to young Jake, except that he meets Stella, a wisp of a girl with a gaggle of sisters. He spots her here and there, at the bus stop and in the supermarket and then she shows up at his house, to see his mum's new baby, Daisy.
He thinks it very odd that a girl would just come and call like that, but when he returns the visit they become friends, sharing their favourite things: she likes words and he likes dreaming up new colours and anything to do with fish. Stella's house is a wonderfully chaotic place where children lurk under tables, and Stella's parents treat all of them as grown-ups, encouraging one of the younger girls to understand maths by working out how much pasta is needed for dinner.
Jake's house is altogether different, with Daisy now the centre of attention and Jake's mother, a poet, deciding to marry her partner, who is not Jake's dad. He tries very hard to be Dad, and his efforts are pretty cringe-making, but Jake is having none of it, even if it means upsetting his mother on her wedding day.
He's far more likely to listen to Mrs Kennedy, an old lady who has moved to the house next to Stella's and who invites them over to tea and dispenses the sort of advice we could all do with, such as that life is not a bowl of cherries but a bowl of cherries is still a bowl of cherries. When Jake and Stella have a falling out over a fishing trip, it is Mrs Kennedy who tries to put things right, and when the terrible thing happens soon after, Mrs Kennedy struggles over to Jake's house on her walking frame, to talk to him and tell him what's the right thing to do. Jake is devastated.
He blames himself for what happened and he doesn't want to face the world, but Mrs Kennedy persuades him that he is not the important person in all this - Stella is, and she needs him to be there. The ending is as happy as it can be under the circumstances, with he and Stella best friends again. His step-dad is planning to take him to Old Trafford, and finally Jake realises that even if he is not his real dad he's the best one he's got.
Parkinson has won numerous awards for her books aimed at young children and teenagers and Something Invisible should scoop up more prizes, with its simple uncomplicated language telling an important story for all ages.
The Navigator (Harper Collins, £12.99) is Eoin McNamee's first novel for children and, on the face of it, a real departure for the author known for his edgy and bleak depictions of Ireland during the Troubles. Read on, however, and the same elements are here - war, strife, hatreds and divisions of all kinds flourish in the world that Owen is plunged into from the day he is chosen by a miniature man in uniform - the Sub Commandant - to join the Resisters, an army that has come out of nowhere to fight The Harsh. The Harsh is a terrible enemy, a bleak and joyless people who want to eliminate time and freeze their enemies with deadly icicle fire.
A deadly series of battles ensues, but what if one of their leaders crosses to the other side to try and negotiate with the enemy? The Navigator moves at lightning speed, time speeds up and slows down in the race to defeat the Great Machine of the North. It's a dazzling read, full of menace with brilliant battle scenes and hideously imaginative killers. Owen has to discover why he has been chosen, and what does the antique chest his father insisted he keep have to do with it all? Don't be surprised to see boys of all ages reading this.
The Intruders by EE Richardson (The Bodley Head, £8.99) is a ghoulish little book on the well-worn theme of the haunted house. The twist is that the children who move in with their misguided parents don't exactly get on with each other. Joel and his sister Cassie find themselves with two step-brothers, Damon and Tim, when their mother hooks up with Gerald, and they all move into a big old house where strange things begin to happen. Joel has fleeting glimpses of a white-faced boy who seems very, very scared, and bit by bit he begins to find out why as he and Tim relive the terror of 50 years before . . .
In The Secret Country by Jane Johnson (Simon and Schuster, £5.99), Ben falls in love with a pair of Mongolian fighting fish at his local pet shop and saves up for weeks and weeks to buy them. When he finally has enough money, and when awful Uncle Alesdair has rolled around with a fish tank from the time his ghastly daughter Cynthia kept piranhas, Ben finds himself buying a cat instead. But then Ignatius Sorvo Coromandel - Iggy for short - is no ordinary cat. For starters he can talk, and soon he has drawn Ben into the magical world of Eidolan, whose magical creatures have begun to appear in our world, thanks to the evil goings-on at Mr Dodds's Pet Emporium.
If anyone knows what young readers want, Jane Johnson should. She's the publisher of Harper Collins's science fiction and fantasy list, Voyager, and she has been involved in the publishing of JRR Tolkien's work for 15 years. The Secret Country is a charmer of a book and the start of a series.
Isabel is the girl nice middle-class parents are terrified their daughters will become. At 16, she's all booze, fags and attitude and she's got no time for her sad widower dad who stupidly named her after the heroine of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James - a guy, she says, who could have done with using the odd full stop or comma.
Sarra Manning's Let's Get Lost (Bite, a division of Hodder Headline, £5.99) begins with Isabel raiding her dead mother's wardrobe to go to a party where among all the geeks she meets Smith, the boy with the bright blue eyes she can't forget. She might be the meanest girl in the school but Isabel does have a heart buried deep inside that hard-as-nails exterior and when she goes to sleep at night she dreams about her mother. Sarra Manning has been compared to an older Jacqueline Wilson and her previous books, Pretty Things, Guitar Girl and Diary of a Crush have gone down well with readers who can take a lot more gritty reality mixed up with their romance.
Carnegie medal-winning author Sharon Creech's Replay (Bloomsbury, £10.99) is one of those funny heartfelt stories that will appeal to any child who feels like the odd one out in the family. Leo, short for Leonardo, is squashed in between his siblings, Pietro, Contento and little Nunzio, so much so that his family calls him sardine. In his dreams, though, Leo is lots of things - he saves people's lives, he coaches the winning team, he is a spy and an investigator when no one is home, he's a famous author and an actor!
The last is for real. When he is picked to act the part of an old crone in the school play he has a chance to stand out and impress his dad, a man worn out by living in what he describes as a zoo, but who once found happiness in tap- dancing. A book full of friendship, laughter and daydreams, it will suit 10-plus readers who prefer gentle stuff to the hyper-imaginative stories that seem to dominate the shelves for their age group.
Orna Mulcahy is an Irish Times journalist