The Unicorn Prince, written by Saviour Pirotta, illustrated by Jane Ray, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

           

 ‘High on a hill, where the moors ended and the forest began, stood a lonely castle.’

So begins this glorious fairytale in which Annis and her grandmother go from poverty to comfort, but a kind of comfort that best suits them. At the story's start, Annis may be squashed into a small room with her grandmother and animals, but her dreams ‘are wild and free’, finding a unicorn, then galloping those moors with him, discovering fairies in need of help … who, in turn, give help to them. 

            But the fairies imagined by Saviour Pirotta and Jane Ray aren’t the little girl birthday party kind of pink pretty flurries of cuteness. These are much more interesting, fairies with attitude and power. 

And Annis isn’t going to say ‘yes’ to princes who want to marry her and make her their queen if she finds them pompous or boring. She wants to pair up with a friend … and you’ll have to get hold of a copy of this book to find out who that might be!

            Jane Ray’s pictures are full of beauty and humour. Altogether, this is a pretty perfect picture book fairytale.

PS It's just coming out in paperback. But it's a treasure of a book you might well want to have in hardback.

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SPIRIT by Sally Christie Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Sally Christie is very good at opening paragraphs. 

"I saw a real live fairy," he said, "and I took it home in a bag."
Well, what would you think if someone said that? If it was someone you knew - a friend - you might say they were joking. But nobody knew Matt Barker. No one could guess why he'd said what he'd said. Was he attention seeking? Was he a show off? He didn't look the type.

This has it all:  a mystery, perhaps a way into a fantasy, and above all, the introduction of a character we're immediately anxious to know much more about. The scene takes place on a school bus on a school trip and it's part of a game called the Truth Game in which everyone has to tell the truth.

From that beginning, we're drawn into a wonderful mix of the ordinary and the extraordinary: school life and the life of nature  around us, young protagonists who are on the edge of adulthood and who need to negotiate the difficult terrain of friendship, and relationships with their contemporaries but who also are still children and open to possibilities in the natural (and supernatural) world that adults would scoff at.

Matt Barker has a friend called Jazzy who lives up to her name. She's very outgoing, unlike Matt, and  is even playing Ariel in the school production of The Tempest. She's the only person who believes Matt and it's she who accompanies him when he goes up to Burnham Wood, which is named deliberately, I'm quite sure, to have a Shakespearean resonance.

While the fairy element is focused on the wood, back  at school, Jazzy is having to negotiate her friendship with the cool girls and Matt has to  fit into school life, too. He loves football and the story of what happens to him on that front is another thread that's a pleasure to follow through the novel. Matt also has a dog called Dash, who is an important part of the action, and altogether delightful.

The school play figures large at the end, and Jazzy's performance opens Matt's eyes to more than another facet of his friend's character.  Any young person reading Spirit, quite apart from enjoying a very exciting and involving story, will learn a great deal about Shakespeare and be led, with luck, to wanting to know more.

Christie is a most wonderfully economical and resonant writer. She knows that simplicity is more telling than laying on the purple prose. She can summon up a scene with the lightest of touches and you are transported to a wood at night as deftly as you're introduced into a modern classroom.  She's also good at dialogue and the children who surround Matt and Jazzy all come to vivid life. Angela, Dip, Mickey and the others inhabit a real world which everyone will recognise.

As an afterword, Christie writes this: "This story isn't just about trees, but readers who like explanations for things may choose to interpret it partly as my farewell to the ash." People were worried about ash dieback disease, she says, and they still are. Christie is a passionate advocate for nature and her feelings for trees, plants and the landscape shine out of the book.


This novel seems just right for Years 7 and 8, but it works brilliantly for adults too. I loved it and can't wait for Christie's third novel.


Published by David Fickling Books in hardback. £10.99

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CUCKOO SONG by Frances Hardinge, reviewed by Cecilia Busby

Her head hurt. There was a sound grating against her mind, a music-less rasp like the rustling of paper. Somebody had taken a laugh, crumpled it into a great, crackly ball, and stuffed her skull with it. Seven days, it laughed. Seven days.

When I opened Frances Hardinge's new book, Cuckoo Song and read those words, I knew I was going to enjoy it. After a few more pages, I found myself closing the book, and hugging it close to my chest. I wanted to hold on to that moment - the fizz and delight of knowing this story was going to  get under my skin and make me live it, and for as long as I stopped, and refused to read any more, it would all still be there, waiting for me, stretching out ahead. It's the best feeling - and Cuckoo Song didn't disappoint. It's a glorious, imaginative, delicately spooky book, with characters that stay with you afterwards, and some fine twists and turns of plot.

One of the plot twists is quite a big one, and it's hard to review the book without giving it away, but I'll do my best. In fact, anyone even vaguely familiar with fairy tales will probably guess it quite early on (I did) but it doesn't spoil the story. There's still plenty of tension in working out exactly how this twist will play out and what will happen when it's discovered. And tension is one of the things that Hardinge does incredibly well in this book - from the first page, and that ominous 'seven days', the reader knows this is a story that has a ticking clock in the background. 

The book opens with the main protagonist, Triss, waking in bed and learning that she has been rescued from nearly drowning. Her memories of the event are elusive - and in fact, there's something very odd about all her memories. She's not sure who she is, or how she got there, and even when details of her life come back, they still feel odd, not quite real. It's as if she's acting the part of being herself. Something happened to Triss in the Grimmer - the lake where she nearly drowned - and she needs to find out what it is. She is ravenously hungry; leaves and bits of earth appear in her bedroom without any explanation; every night she has strange dreams, and each night the countdown is one less: six days left... five days...

Triss also has to contend with a fiercely antagonistic younger sister, Pen, jealous of the special attention the invalid Triss gets from their parents, and also apparently terrified of her older sister. But it's Pen who holds the key to what has happened, and it's only when the two sisters join forces that they begin to have a glimmer of a chance against the mysterious Architect who's behind it all. The bond between the two sisters is at the heart of the story, and Hardinge skilfully shows the mix of jealousy, rivalry, loyalty, love and exasperation that animates their relationship.

The book is set in the 1920s, in an imaginary industrial town in, at a guess, the midlands, and the fairy-tale elements gain some of their power from the contrast with this very down-to-earth setting of trams, telephones and motorcars. It's the beginning of the modern era, but lurking in the shadows of the remaining gas-lamps, and in the cracks and wastelands of industrial development, are the Besiders, Hardinge's version of the fairies. The Architect is the most powerful but there are others, too - the Shrike, with his strange bird-like face, and others, whose shadows flit across the corner of your vision - and they want something from the humans, something they are prepared to kill for.

But it's not just the story that makes this book so brilliant - although that's superbly realised - it's also the language. Hardinge's images and descriptions are pure delight, and on almost any page you can find a sentence that will make you want to copy it out and put it on the wall to remind you of what amazing writing looks like. Here she is on jazz:

All the instruments plunged in at once, as if they'd been holding a party and somebody had opened a door on them. Where was the tune? It was in there somewhere, but the instruments fought over it, tossed it between them, dropped it and trod on it, did something else, then picked it up again and flung it in the air just when you were least expecting it.

Later, Triss watches a party of young men and women dancing to some of this untamed music in an old warehouse down near the river. The windows, looking out over the water, make her feel as if she's on a boat.

Nobody was steering the boat, everybody was dancing, and nobody danced more wildly than Violet. There was something desperate about it, as if dancing would stop the boat sinking. There was something fierce about it, as if she wanted to drive her foot through the hull and sink the boat faster.

Violet, the ex-fiancee of Triss and Pen's dead brother Sebastian, is a motorbike-riding, cigarette-smoking, thoroughly fast young woman. In her acknowledgements, Hardinge suggests that the inspiration for Violet was her own grandmother, who 'threw her home village into confusion when she returned from London on a motorbike'. Wherever she came from, she's another treat in a book full of them.

In a recent blog post on ABBA, I tried to come up with a set of criteria that got at the heart of what a really good children's book should be. Cuckoo Song, for me, fulfils all those criteria with gusto, humour, wit and pure panache. 

C.J. Busby writes funny fantasy adventures for  age 7-11. Her latest book, DEEP AMBER,  was published in March 2014 by Templar and has been shortlisted for the Stockton Book Award.

@ceciliabusby

www.cjbusby.co.uk

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