Magic moments from the lovely long-ago were re-kindled by The School at the Chalet, by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (Collins, £5.99 in UK). First published in 1925, it was to be the precursor of some 60 books about the girls of the Chalet School: Madge, Grizel, Gisela, but above all Joey Bettany. Located in the Austrian Tyrol, the school suffered many vicissitudes over the 40-year span of the books, including a spell in exile during the war years.
This first volume tells of the setting up of the school, and the arrival of pupils from all over the world. Old-fashioned in its values, perhaps, compared with the lack of them in the naughty, modern youthful view of things, the book still has a lot to offer for those who believe that innocence remains a component of childhood.
Another re-issue is A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (Penguin Books, £6.99 in UK). Set in a Yorkshire mining town in the cheerless 1960s, it tells the story of young Billy Casper and his love for a kestrel hawk and the freedom it epitomises. The book was made into the film Kes, which was highly acclaimed. Irish readers may have difficulty with the Yorkshire patois and the unrelenting dreariness of Billy's home life, but for an intensely raw and bitingly honest view of the time and the place the book is highly authentic.
Two from Poolbeg next, both priced at IR£3.99: Free Fall by Martina Murphy and Surf Summer by Soinbhe Lally. The first is the more serious of the two, detailing the rift in 18-year-old Hannah's life when her father leaves home. Written in two time scales, the present and the recent past, the narrative is delicate, yet insightful, in its handling of a family problem that is all too common nowadays.
In Surf Summer, Ms Lally also recounts an all-too-familiar story, the efforts of big business to make money by spoiling a natural beauty spot, in this case blasting away a reef in Donegal in order to build a marina. A disparate group of young people band together in an attempt to foil the endeavour: there's feminist Rosa with a penchant for setting things on fire, Lar, who adores her and takes the blame for her misdemeanours, and Jenny, whose father is the principal investor in the project. Told in alternate sections by these three participants, the story sweeps along like the surfing waves onto the Donegal beach.
There is a completely different setting and a much grimmer storyline in Donna Jo Napoli's Stones in Water (OUP, £5.99 in UK). Venice in the 1940s and Roberto and his friend, Samuele, are rounded up and sent to work in a Nazi labour camp. When Samuele dies, Roberto vows to escape, and the remainder of the narrative is taken up with his efforts to do just that. Not for the faint of heart, Stones in Water tells a stark tale, but one that most modern teenagers will be ignorant of and, perhaps, should know about.
Virtual Sexual Reality by Chloe Rayban (Red Fox, £3.99 in UK) is the book upon which the recent hit film, Virtual Sexuality, is based. In spite of the overt connotations of the title, the book - I haven't seen the film - is a light-hearted account of how Justine visits a Virtual Reality Exhibition in the hope that she'll catch the eye of macho Alex and instead gets unlucky with an Alternative Reality machine and comes out as Jake! Much play is then made of gender transference, with Justine as Jake hanging out with the lads, but when her real self develops a crush on her virtual self, things really begin to fall apart. Ridiculous, but full of laughs.
In Stiks & Stoans (Mammoth, £4.99 in UK), Andrew Matthews tells of how dyslexic Ella is bullied by Billy Pickett and his gang, and of how new boy Liam attempts to defend her. The story is a powerful one, but it is told in a prose that is itself slightly off-centre, and the fact that Ella's diary is also written as someone who is dyslexic might pen it is also off-putting. Still, a good try at analysing a very relevant social problem.
To finish, in the Oxford Children's Modern Classics series, the final two books in the Flambards sequence by K. M. Peyton: Flambards in Summer and Flambards Divided, both £5.99 in UK. These bring to a close the saga of Christina and her on-again, off-again relationship with the great, ivy-covered house of Flambards. Set at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, the books constitute a tapestry that should appeal to any modern teenager with a spark of romance in his or her nature.
Vincent Banville is the author of the Hennessy series for teenagers.