BEST CHILDREN’S FICTION, The Times, December 2004

Pop-ups introduce children to the magic of books by having a story leap out at them. An all-time favourites, Paul and Henrietta Strickland’s Dinosaur Roar, is now a pop-up called Dinosaurs Galore (Ragged Bears £12.99). Big and little dinos chomp, claw, pounce and ultimately lunge. Any toddler will be in bliss. Gentler ones will love Poppy Cat’s Christmas (Campbell Books £14.99) in which a cat, dog and rabbit get a flashing tree that, playing Silent Night, is guaranteed to drive you mad in minutes.

Emma Chichester-Clark is an inspired illustrator, and slightly older children will also relish her version of Aesop’s Fables (Orchard £12.99), charmingly rewritten by the Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo. Daisy-crowned cows gazing at the dog in their manger and the traveller lying stock-still as a black bear looms over him are unique visions of gaiety and menace that will stay with a child for life. Helen Ward’s version of the same cautionary tales, Unwitting Wisdom (Templar £14.95), is exquisitely illustrated, with dazzling details of exotic animals that older children of 6+ will treasure and ponder.

Those of an optimistic bent might wish to educate their child over the holidays. Colin Hawkins’s Takeaway Monsters and Adding Animals (Mathew Price £8.99), are really funny and clever, and infants will love making monsters fall splat into their food while doing sums. Of course, you could just check they can count to 20 first, in which case Christopher Wormell’s Teeth Tails & Tentacles (Running Press Kids £12.99) is sublime. A leading English engraver, the temptation will be to frame his dynamic images of animals for yourself. Ordinary kids prefer tricksters, however. The Gruffalo’s Child (Macmillan £9.99) isn’t as good as the original but will still make toddlers shriek with joy. Nick Butterworth’s The Whisperer (Harpercollins £10.99) has a cunning rat outwitted by amorous cats embroiled in a Romeo & Juliet feline feud. Scrumptious pictures and sardonic text make this irresistible – but beware: kids will demand a kitten next. Francesca Simon’s hideously funny antihero Horrid Henry has all his worst school exploits collected in his Big Bad Book (Orion £4.99), which includes accounts of his best and worst lessons, school reports and coloured illustrations by the matchless Tony Ross. Expect some very bad behaviour if you give them this, but also much laughter.

On a more traditional Christmas theme, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s How Many Miles to Bethlehem (Orion £9.99) has each of the main protagonists take up the tale, as in a Nativity play. The richly dramatic, majestic illustrations by Peter Malone produce a partnership made in heaven. Rumer Godden’s The Story of Holly & Ivy, illustrated by Christian Birmingham, is about a little lost orphan who finds a lonely doll. Godden had a special feeling for the beauty and delicacy of childhood, as for the yearning to love and be loved. Hurrah for Macmillan reprinting this glowing gem of dollanity, which no small girl could fail to adore (£9.99). Philippa Pearce, author of Tom’s Midnight Garden, makes a brief but captivating reappearance with a solitary girl who discovers an enchanted mole. The Little Gentleman (Puffin £9.99) is over 300 years old and, bewitched by Jacobites to kill King William ll, is now miserably tunnelling away from humans. Frothy sympathy and dead-pan comedy spout from Roddy Doyle’s The Meanwhile Adventures (Scholastic £9.99) in which hopeless Mr. Mack has to be helped by his children and Rover the wonder-dog to overcome some persistent slugs. My son insisted on reading me all the jokes, but with chapters only a page or two long it’s great for building confidence even if it sets adult teeth on edge.

The Conch Bearer, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Chicken House £12.99) sees scholarly Anand, streetwise Nisha and a wise old man journey through burning Indian plains and jagged mountains, hunted by evil spirits. A wise fable about the acquisition of spiritual grace, it is something godparents could hand thoughtful 8+ children with complete confidence. So, too, are two new books by masters of storytelling. Cornelia Funke’s Dragon Rider (Chicken House £10.99) is every young boy’s dream. A dragon, Firedrake, a brownie and lonely Ben set off on a quest to find the mountains where dragons can live in peace – pursued by an evil golden dragon and his accomplice Twigleg, a spy. It’s perfect for curling up with on a winter day, although it does have its longeurs. Not so Philip Pullman’s picaresque tale of The Scarecrow & His Servant (Doubleday £10.99.), in which a scarecrow carrying a legal document is magically brought to life and, assisted by his servant Jack, terrifies brigands, routs soldiers and eventually brings justice to the land. All the satirical gusto and imaginative zest of Pullman’s other classics for children leap off the page, as do the expressive line-drawings by Peter Benson. The scene in which the turnip-headed Scarecrow discovers he’s too stupid to be anything but an officer, is the funniest in any book published this year. Put this, and JBS Haldane’s tales of life with a magician, My Friend Mr. Leakey, (Jane Nissen £6.99) in every bright child’s stocking, they’ll love it.

I detest Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, but many children feel quite differently about his gruesome shaggy-dog series, and the latest, The Grim Grotto, (Egmont £6.99) bubbles its lugubrious way to the bottom of the sea in a submarine, where the evil Count Olaf fails once again to slaughter the maddeningly bright Baudelaire orphans. Perhaps he needs help from the Kraken in Emily Windsnap & the Monster of the Deep (Orion £7.99). Emily (a normal girl until she touches water) tells a tale of Neptune’s machinations that girls of 8+ will plunge into with delight. For those who prefer their stories to be rooted in reality, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Millions (Macmillan £4.99) is a comic sparkler about two bereaved brothers who find a suitcase of stolen money, and spend it in touching and unexpected ways while pursued by crooks. Like A Series of Unfortunate Events, Millions has been turned into a film, also out this Christmas, but the book is even better.

Martin Jenkins’s retelling of Gulliver’s Travels (Walker Books £14.99), is illustrated by the deliciously quirky Chris Riddell. The politically aware will enjoy seeing Tony Blair having his ear tweaked by doctors in Lagado, but this savagely entertaining picture book is for sophisticated kids only, because after the famous Lilliputan adventure most will get lost. Lynne Reid Banks’s Tiger, Tiger (Colins £10.99) is a gripping, heartfelt tale of twin tigers set in Ancient Rome – one the pampered pet of a princess, one brutalised to be a killer in the Colosseum. How can they and their humans win free?

Children of 10+ want books about teenagers. If there is one who has not yet discovered Anthony Horowitz’s stupendously exciting Alex Rider series, then there are four to buy before the latest, Scorpia (Walker £4.99) sweeps you off with the junior James Bond as he swims through a sewer in a Venetian canal, jump-dives onto a pharmaceutical factory and saves every child in London. Just as gripping is Terri Paddock’s thriller, Come Clean (Collins £6.99), based on her family’s experience with an American anti-drugs cult. A harrowing and original thriller about personal choice and parental stupidity, it’s Catcher in the Rye for kids - albeit with a happy ending of sorts. Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (Puffin £10.99) has already won prizes for it’s intense and startling prediction of Britain undergoing the third World War – as seen through the eyes of Daisy, an angry American anorexic staying with her eccentric English cousins. Heartbreakingly romantic, it charts the moral growth of someone who begins as a spoilt city babe and ends as a genuine heroine. Tougher kids will prefer the climax to Darren Shan’s relentlessly ripping vampire series, Sons of Destiny (Collins £4.99), in which Darren faces his ultimate enemy in the journey from boy to Vampire Prince. More subtle, if also compellingly creepy is Joyce Carol Oates’s Freaky Green Eyes (Harpercollins £5.99), in which a girl whose family is dominated by her famous bullying father, learns to find the courage to break free.

All of these books would make great gifts. However, if I had to choose three books above all to give to a child, they would be Cressida Cowell’s How to be a Pirate (7+), Nancy Farmer’s Sea of Trolls (Simon & Schuster 9+) and Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother (Orion (9+). Coincidentally, the first two are about Vikings, whose brutal existence, give or take a few dragons, are depicted with vigour and wisdom as their respective heroes – nerd and bard – battle their way to safety. But it is Wolf Brother, the first of a seven-book series set in the deep dark forests of the Bronze Age, which my son read by torchlight under the duvet, and which my entire family listened to, spellbound for six hours. With its natural magic, struggle for survival and utterly adorable wolf-cub this is the one that will stay in the memory, long after other winter’s tales have gone.