The best: Older children’s books

There’s not much point in reviewing some books. If children are Tom Gates obsessives, they’ll read Liz Pinchon’s latest, Tom Gates Genius Ideas (mostly) (Scholastic, £6.99) regardless of what you think of a schoolboy diary with not much text and lots of doodles.

Ditto Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers (Scholastic, £9.99): it’s funny, subversive, and with a large ratio of comic strip to text. Just go with it.

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is a work of genius: a combination of American teenspeak and junk food with the entire cast of Graeco-Roman mythology. The latest, The Mark of Athena (Puffin, £12.99), features the young American demigods plus Hercules, Bacchus and Arachne, and a sortie to the gates of Hades. Business as usual, then.

Michelle Paver’s new series, Gods and Warriors (Puffin, £12.99), is something else. Set in Bronze Age Greece it has her hallmarks; an apparently effortless familiarity with the long-dead past and engaging friendship between man and beast, or in this case, dolphin.

This being the bicentenary of the Grimm Bros Fairy Tales, there are some lovely editions about. It’s a toss-up between the longer selection, which includes Fetching Down the Moon, illustrated by Michael Foreman and translated by Brian Alderson (Templar, £16.99) or the shorter version translated by Anthea Bell, (of Asterix fame) and finely illustrated by Lizbeth Zwerger (minedition, £19.99). I would mention Philip Pullman’s translation but it has no pictures. And what, as Alice says, is the point of books without pictures?

Don’t judge a book by its cover, though: remember that with R.J. Palacio’s Wonder (Bodley Head, £12.99), which has a horrid one. It’s about an Elephant Boy with a hideous face who has to fit into a new school. It sounds like a diversity manifesto but it’s a shrewd take on the dynamics of US school life and a moving account of, well, being different.

Rebecca Stead’s Liar and Spy (Andersen, £9.99) is about a boy whose life sucks too: he has to move home when his dad loses his job. He encounters an eccentric boy in the new place, who runs a spy club, and is spying on Mr X, on the upstairs floor. It’s about what happens when fantasy and reality become blurred and it’s oddly compelling.

I loved Chris Bradford’s Young Samurai series: odd, because martial arts, the author’s speciality, aren’t my bag. But his account of Jack Fletcher, an English boy cast up on the Japanese coast during the upheavals of the 17th century, who turns samurai, is addictive. The Ring of Sky (Puffin, £6.99) is the last; I’m bereft.

If I have a weakness, it’s for dragons and Dragon Legends (Pavilion, £5.99) by David Passes, illustrated by Wayne Anderson, is a succession of good dragon stories, from Gilgamesh to St George. Lovely.

Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass (Macmillan, £12.99) is almost bewildering in its abundance of invention; it’s about a girl who lives in a subterranean world where people learn facial expressions like a foreign language. Weird, and wonderful.