Before video games dangled dopamine hits and a sense of agency, there were Choose Your Own Adventure books, where the reader could go through the portal – or turn to face the monster. The 1980s-90s franchise still holds much affection, cropping up in a forthcoming Stranger Things homage spin-off, Heroes and Monsters, for one.
A new Pushkin Children’s reboot features six pacy titles by one of the most prolific original authors in the series, the late RA Montgomery: romps such as The Abominable Snowman, which has 28 possible endings, and Journey Under the Sea. The hope is to lure children back into their imaginations.
The concept is brought up to date for our anxious times in Helen Rutter’s The Boy With Big Decisions (Scholastic). Fred’s helicopter parents run his life, but how long can he go on being a doormat, suppressing his interest in art? On his first day of secondary school , Fred could take the bus to his father’s old alma mater, or he could board one to the lovely school his parents rejected. Less gung ho than the originals, this multi-stranded book nonetheless deal in real-life high stakes.
Anthony McGowan won the Carnegie Medal in 2020 for the climax of his last series, Lark (2019). The Beck (Barrington Stoke) is a new standalone story in an urban setting. Kyle’s grouchy, widowed grandfather lives in Leeds with a newly adopted three-legged dog called Rude Word.
But he’s got something else to show Kyle – a stream, or beck, at the bottom of his garden, unprepossessing but home to crayfish and threatened by developers. Kyle has headaches of his own: a poorly mother; emboldened school bullies. When disaster strikes, Kyle must guess and execute his grandad’s cunning plan. The unexpected help of an unlikely ally at the 11th hour speaks to ordinary people’s willingness to do a good turn.
I adored Pádraig Kenny’s 2020 book, The Monsters of Rookhaven. His latest is set in a bleak, not-too-distant future in which a tech bro’s sentient machines have turned on their creators. In After (Walker), orphaned Jen is looked after by Father, whose “mek” nature must be kept secret lest he be set upon by vengeful survivors; cue shades of C-3PO and Blade Runner. When Jen and Father find asylum in a self-sustaining community, Jen gradually realises that all is not as it seems. In a nail-biting series of plot twists, human and droid loyalties are tested.
The past, meanwhile, is still alive. In The Line They Drew Through Us (Andersen), Hiba Noor Khan attempts to convey the enormity of the 1947 partition of India through the fates of three close friends, Jahan, Ravi and Aisha (known as Lakshmi – a Hindu nickname, despite her being Muslim). In a book densely packed with sensory details – food, smells, music, dread – the children bravely foil a deadly riot but can’t outrun history itself. The novel’s central thrusts remain current: that religious and ethnic groups are pitted against each other by the powers that be; that hope and friendship matter.
The Thames features in Miniaturist author Jessie Burton’s third book for children, Hidden Treasure (Bloomsbury), one of two London river novels laced with fantastical elements. While mudlarking, Bo Delafort finds a dazzling, moon-shaped jewel. She could sell it, but the jewel seems to possess strange powers. Bo quickly learns that a desperate man is after it. With the help of her new friend Billy, Bo sets out to decipher old river ballads about the jewel, only to learn of her brother’s death in the first world war. Could the Eclipsing Moon truly bring back the dead?
Mudlarks are also on hand to help the plucky Cassia Thorne, the heroine of Zohra Nabi’s new series. In Deep Dark (Simon & Schuster), London’s street urchins are going missing and no one cares – apart from the children’s families, Cassia and her unlikely ally Felix, who together uncover a plot that stretches from the river to the most distant reaches of empire.
Nabi’s book is an assured mix of impeccably researched reality – from thieves’ cant to Bartholomew Fair – and supernatural dread. There really is a monster for Cassia to turn and face – one that is, from the grownup view at least, an avatar for the cruelty visited by the greedy and powerful upon the powerless.
