The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Of sovereigns and snow girls
Young readers were treated to tales of the King – and other majestic heroes
This year, children’s fiction hailed a new superhero in the form of Charles III, who starred in a deluge of picture books to mark his Coronation. Some were dramatic. In The King’s Pants by Nicholas Allan (Andersen, £7.99), a Royal Mail blunder results in the loss of the Coronation underwear, threatening to sabotage the big day. Events take a similarly uneasy turn in The King’s Runaway Crown (OUP, £7.99) by Rosalind Spark, in which His Majesty’s Jack Russell absconds with the crown on the morning of the Coronation.
In a similarly mischievous vein, Three Little Monkeys and the Grand Hotel (Harper Collins, £12.99) is the latest instalment in the series by Quentin Blake and Emma Chichester Clark. It sees Hilda Snibbs’s pets on reliable form, causing the head waiter to faint into the raspberry mousse. For any toddlers wanting to ponder life’s bigger conundrums, Begin Again by Oliver Jeffers (Harper Collins, £20) tells the story of the human race in 112 pages, with such meaty questions as “Where did we begin?” and “Where are we going?”
Fantasy remains a dominant theme in children’s books, with
some sumptuous reworkings of the classics. Saving Neverland (Puffin, £14.99) is Abi Elphinstone’s reimagining of Peter Pan: two children living in a flat in the old Darling family home in Bloomsbury come to the aid of a cursed Neverland. Island of Whispers by Frances
Hardinge (Two Hoots, £14.99), meanwhile, looks like a picture book, but don’t be deceived: this illustrated fantasy, aimed at readers aged 12 and over, tells the eerie story of a boy’s quest to save an island cursed by the souls of the dead: “Even the sight of them could kill.”
In The Snow Girl (Usborne, £12.99), Sophie Anderson draws on familiar fantasy tropes to tell the beautifully imagined story of a child’s adventures with a girl made of snow. (“I wish the snow girl would come to life. Then I would have a friend, a real friend I could trust.”) Ghostlord (Little Island, £8.99) is the second instalment in Philip Womack’s thrilling Wildlord trilogy. This time, the heroine is a teenage girl who fights to free the ghost of a young boy imprisoned for 500 years by a necromancer. And for slightly older readers, Katherine Rundell offered the stunning Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury, £14.99), her latest adventure, about a boy who visits his grandfather in Scotland and discovers a magical archipelago, “a land where all the creatures of myth still live and thrive”.
It has also been a bumper year for historical fiction. The Wolf-Girl, the Greeks and the Gods (Walker, £25) by Tom Holland is one of the gems. Using a mix of myth and history, Holland recounts the story of the Greco-Persian wars through the eyes of a young Spartan princess. And Yours from the Tower (Andersen, £14.99) by Sally Nicholls uses the fictional letters of three best friends from boarding school to imagine life for a young girl in late Victorian England: “No, I have not fallen in love yet – though I certainly intend to be married before the end of the Season.”
Finally, in non-fiction, the King also reigned supreme – although King Charles by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara (£9.99, Frances Lincoln), the pick of the bunch, reads more like a fairy tale. This short biography recounts the sovereign’s journey from “little Prince to grown-up King”, and his eventual marriage to the Queen, “his closest friend for 35 years”. And finally, should you wish to wrest your child off the internet, The Handbook of Forgotten Skills (Magic Cat, £17.99), by Natalie Crowley, Elaine Batiste and Chris Duriez, has instructions on everything from tying knots to sewing on buttons. “Thank-you notes,” add the authors, “remain a timeless classic that never go out of style.” It’s a lesson that will feel particularly pertinent on Boxing Day.