Popular or literary fiction? Initially, younger readers don't care - why should they? - and the titles reviewed here offer fine examples of both.
No one, for example, reads Enid Blyton forever but she's a perfect springboard for many; and any book by any writer will send readers in search of an even better one. For "popular", try Colin Bateman's Reservoir Pups (Hodder, £5.99 ), set in Belfast. Twelve-year-old Eddie Malone's "nice life, nice house, nice father, nice family" ends when Dad heads off with "Spaghetti Legs". So far, so predictable. And then Eddie meets Bacon, Bap and Captain Black, the self-styled Pups of the title: "We steal from the rich - and we keep it." There are break-ins, break-outs, scenes in a morgue, a 12-babies kidnapping, an ambulance chase, a 17th-floor rescue, a hollowed-out mountain where the richest woman in the world is concocting her evil empire and a character called Diet Coke. Bateman's Eddie, like Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider, is a risk-taker and Reservoir Pups is the great escape read: its improbable, fast-forward plot, colourful characters and serious issues are cleverly handled. Entertainment guaranteed.
"Who wants to be a millionaire?" buzzes about in our heads and in Millions (Macmillan, £9.99), by Frank Cottrell Boyce, nine-year-old Damian Cunningham is suddenly rich after a bag of money whooshes from a speeding train and lands in his back garden. This is a terrific, uplifting story: fresh, funny, fast and unusual. Mum has died, Damian and Anthony live with Dad, but Cottrell Boyce avoids any predictable sob-sob story and creates a well-paced narrative that includes wacky saints, odd information, Mormons, a Nativity play, money problems and spending sprees of a totally different kind. In tone, it's a younger, brighter version of Mark Haddon's Curious Incident . . . with a feel-good ending. Damian's Mum comes to him in a vision and reminds him that "the thing to remember is that there's nearly always enough good around to be going on with". Sometimes, as in Millions, dreams do come true.
Joan Aiken, who died this year, wrote more than 100 books and created a world like no other. In Midwinter Nightingale (Jonathan Cape, £10.99) there's a missing king, a wicked baron, the feisty Dido Twite, kidnappings, chain-letters, the threat of invasion and a coronation. Names and places are deliberately daft and, though the book is set in the past, Aiken is never hemmed in by history. Every page has quirkily dramatic episodes and lively exchanges. When Lot says that "conceited, la-di-da" Simon Bakerloo will "soon have the rug pulled from under him", it's an apt description of Aiken's own storytelling technique. But with so many characters and plot twists, this is one for dedicated fan and able reader.
In Piratica (Hodder, £10.99), Tanith Lee, like Joan Aiken, plays with history: set in "Seventeen-Twelvety" Republican England, names are off-kilter - Lundon, Hammer's Smithy, Budgerigar Wharf. A knock on the head restores 16-year-old Art's memory and she sets out to discover her past. The writing is lyrical: snow is "silky-brilliant as new marble", bare trees are "covered in snow-lace and painted with lines of thin gold by the sun" but Lee also delivers a sophisticated, rollicking read. Art meets highway robbers, the beautiful Felix Phoenix, her mother's old theatrical friends, captains a ship and escapes hanging. Road adventure, sea voyage and treasure hunt in one.
Peter Dickinson's The Gift Boat (Macmillan, £9.99), featuring the loving relationship between 11-year-old Gavin and 74-year-old Grandad is a beautiful, touching book. A gift. Grandad's love of the sea and sailing ships and seals, his stroke and hospitalisation, and Gavin's efforts to reach him in his coma, the physiotherapy, the anxieties become the reader's felt experience. Dickinson is no sentimentalist, yet the book is emotionally charged. There's a spiritual, mysterious dimension to the narrative and a dramatic, hallucinatory sequence that ends with a "tiny spasm" and Grandad's twitching lips. In the end things are all right but not "fairy-tale all right" and the novel is all the better for it.
Oven Chips for Tea, by Alex Guttridge (Corgi, £4.99), with a soap-opera plot, is a gobble of a book. Gran and Grandad are splitting up after 40 years and, in Kat's house, with Mum and Dad constantly bickering, "abnormal is normal". Add in school, table-tennis championships, stern teacher with a change of heart, love interest in the form of tall, minty-breath Daniel and you're flying. Cheesy at times, but it's a fast and fluent read.
Finally, Alison Prince's really fine, well-paced, stimulating The Summerhouse (Walker £5.99) tells of novelist Stan, who has writer's block, and the children who help him create again. "Books are like icebergs: there's more hidden underneath than you can ever see", and Prince offers sound advice and real insight into the creative process, such as "All writing gets said in your head first". The book within the book, a thriller, with its genetic modification theme, works well and the double-narrative in itself celebrates and promotes writing and reading.