Children's Books

 Children's books are fantastic.  It's where I first started to become a serious reader through amazing fiction but people who should be better known.  Here are a few that I lapped up as a younger lad and am enthusiastic about.

The Edgeworld Chronicles are a series of three trilogies and a few standalone books by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle about a fantasy world of Edgeworld where there are sky pirates who use floating rocks as their fuel, bears who can talk and wood that has different characteristics when burnt.  The three trilogies each follow the characters of Quint, Twig and Rook who journey through the Edgeworld lands both over and under.  I started with Beyond the Deepwoods with Twig who has to leave his home after breaking a rule and tries to survive in a world he barely knows about.  The second in the Twig trilogy is Stormchaser and by far my favourite of them all.  It’s an exciting story about the sky pirates that was very pleasing.  It’s a massive world (that some may think a tad ripped off from Discworld) that has a huge range of characters and situations meaning that I was reading them for years.

The stories of Philip Ridley are wonders of fantastical realism with well-defined characters and imaginative plots.  I could talk about Scribbleboy about a graffiti artist, or the epic Mighty Fizz Chilla about the search for a mythical creature, or even Vinegar Street that at one point involves out of body projection, but the book I am going to talk about is my favourite Kasper in the Glitter.  Kasper lives with his mother in a beauty salon on a street that is apocalyptic in flavour.  His is a fairly sheltered existence until he finds a teenager in the garden who then takes him on a journey of tyranny and love on the other side of the city.  Brutal fables that intertwines beauty with cruelty but with huge dollops of heart and sensitivity.  Remarkable.

Paul Jennings has to be one of my all time favourite writers with the Un- series of short stories such as Unbearable, Unreal, Uncanny, Unmentionable and Undone, which have been made into the television program Round the Twist.  There are bizarre and weird stories that will enliven your live considerably.  Stories such as a boy who grows nails all over his body, a bug that can make you invisible, a girl who gets a harmonica stuck in her mouth and a boy who falls in love with an ice sculpture.  I devoured these stories often re-reading them with delight.  He’s not as well known now as he once was but it is a truly great way to introduce children to reading, hell it’s where I started and I read books by Thomas Mann now, I didn’t expect that.

The Wind On Fire series by William Nicholson is a fine trilogy that is sociological about fantasy societies.  The Wind Singer is the first book and it starts with the examination of a family’s young child, which is tense because the class of the family depends on their result as the whole society is divided into set classes and you can either go up or down through exam results.  This ends up in a long journey to find the sculpture’s (of which the book gets it’s title) voice.  The second book Slaves of the Mastery is about a different sort of society, one built on slaves and is about the entrapment of the people of the first book.  The final book Firesong is about the monk class of people and their ability to use their minds to control the world around them.  It’s a great series that I should re-read at some point and full of cinematic scenes that I can still clearly remember.  Wonderful.

I hardly need to mention the amazing R.L. Stine with his Goosebumps series, particularly his stories about the living dummy, scared me silly but also opened the way for Edgar Allen Poe to me.  Got to love horror.  And I don't really need to mention Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses as I think it's well known enough but it really was a memorable book.  I always wanted to read Hexwood by Dyanne Wynne Jones but for some reason never got round to it.

So there are a few and if you have children of your own then I would highly recommend you search for these books as you will be thanked by them when they start judging the quality of Nobel Prize Winners when they eventual become part of the committee.