Teddy bears and teenage spies were among the highlights of children’s fiction in 2009.
Winner of the Booktrust Teenage prize was Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury, £7.99, age 11 to adult), in which young Nobody Owens is brought up by strange foster parents — a vampire and a family of ghosts, while Gaiman’s Coraline, featuring sinister bogus parents with button eyes, was made into an animated film.
An altogether cosier world unfolded in Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (Egmont, £12.99), in which David Benedictus created marvellously Milne-like new adventures for Christopher Robin and his friends as replete with enchanting details as its furry hero was with honey and condensed milk.
Morris Gleitzman followed Once, his Holocaust-escape novel, with Then (Puffin, £5.99, age 11 upwards), in which Felix and Zelda continued to dodge their Nazi pursuers, trusting in the spirit of Richmal Crompton to keep them safe.
Telling porkies led to slapstick disasters in Louis Sachar’s Pig City (Bloomsbury, £5.99, age nine to 12), as a secret club wrought havoc in the classroom. Meanwhile, among picture books, Clare Freedman’s and Ben Cort’s aliens roamed the planet, expressing their passion for highly patterned underpants (Aliens in Underpants Save the World, Simon and Schuster, £5.99). And a fly’s-eye perspective was brought to Israel’s must-see tourist sites in the informative and amusing Zvuvi’s Israel by Tami Lehman-Wilzig (Kar-Ben, £5.99), illustrated by Ksenia Topaz.
Louise Rennison’s saga of luurvelorn Georgia Nicolson came to an end in a flurry of jammy dodgers and startled kittycats, in Are These my Basoomas I See Before Me? (HarperCollins, £10.99), while a noir romantic drama set in post-war Palm Beach was played out in Judy Blundell’s What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic, £6.99, age 11 upwards). Another coming-of-age story, The Red Dress, by Gaby Halberstam (Macmillan, £5.99) was set in 1940s’ South Africa, where Rifke runs away from her haimishe mother and finds out the hard way what it is like to live among people with a different language and customs.
Spies, explosions and escapes featured in Gold Strike by Matt Whyman (Simon & Schuster, £6.99) and reached their peak in Crocodile Tears (Walker, £14.99, age nine to adult), the snappy new Alex Ryder adventure from Anthony Horowitz.
