Category: children’s books

The Deadly Daylight by Ash Harrier was an enjoyable middle grade mystery, the first in a series featuring Alice England. Alice is an unusual twelve-year-old who works in her father’s funeral parlour and is able to detect messages from the dead. She is mystified by social conventions and polite lies, she notices details that others miss, and she speaks like an elderly librarian, so predictably, she finds it difficult to make friends with other children. However, she is drawn to an equally unusual girl at school, Violet, who is dangerously allergic to sunlight, and together they solve the mystery of Violet’s uncle’s strange death. It takes a little too long for anything exciting to happen, but there are lots of interesting twists in the final section and I liked watching Alice and Violet learn to compromise and become better at friendship. There is also a diverse cast of characters with disabilities – Alice has a congenital leg disability that makes it difficult for her to walk; Violet and her family have solar urticaria. The author and her neurodiverse daughter have written a thought-provoking article in a recent edition of Magpies discussing how characters with disabilities are portrayed in children’s literature and whether “non-marginalised allies” can successfully write about disabled and neurodivergent characters. The Deadly Daylight will appeal to confident middle grade readers who like mysteries with a hint of the supernatural – and if they enjoy it, there are two more novels about Alice’s adventures.

I also enjoyed London: A Guide for Curious Wanderers, written by history blogger and London guide Jack Chesher, with beautiful illustrations by Katharine Fraser. It’s full of quirky, fascinating facts about London’s history, from Roman to modern times. There are sections on London’s secret tunnels, hidden rivers, lost islands, odd statues, street furniture, post boxes and more. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a really intriguing read, complete with maps for your own self-guided tours if you’re lucky enough to be visiting London.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton was an odd, but engrossing, novel set in New Zealand, in which a collective of anarchist guerrilla gardeners find themselves in an uneasy alliance with an American tech billionaire. It’s described as a ‘literary thriller’ but the Booker-Prize winning author has also stated she aimed to emulate Jane Austen’s prose style, so unsurprisingly, it doesn’t really work as a thriller. There’s a lot of telling rather than showing, the dialogue (which includes an eight-page monologue by one particularly annoying character about the evils of capitalism) is often unrealistic, the villain is cartoonish, there’s often too much detailed description when the pace needs to be faster, and the conclusion is abrupt with no real resolution. On the other hand, many of the characters are well-drawn, recognisable and amusing; the New Zealand setting is beautifully described; and there are a lot of interesting discussions about the environment, technology and the compromises that environmentalists and leftist politicians need to make in modern society in order to progress their goals. I also liked all the guerrilla gardening tips.

I finally got around to reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the “eighth Harry Potter story”, several years after everyone else. This is the published ‘rehearsal script’ of the six-hour play, based on an original story by J.K. Rowling, written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany. It’s essentially official fan-fiction, set nineteen years after the defeat of Voldemort, in which Albus Potter and his best friend Scorpius Malfoy learn not to mess around with time-travel and Harry yet again proves to be clueless about human relationships. I loved all the plot twists and magical world-building, even though it didn’t make complete sense. (Seriously, Hermione using an easily-solved riddle to hide a Time-Turner that shouldn’t even exist? And let’s not even try to imagine the logistics of that whole Voldemort thing.) But mostly I wondered why the story insisted on shoe-horning in girlfriends for Albus and Scorpius when it was clear that the deep love and trust between the two boys was driving the whole narrative. Is no-one allowed to be gay in this magical world (apart from dead closeted Dumbledore and his dead sociopathic love interest Grindelwald)? Scorpius was definitely my favourite character, and I liked how Draco was, predictably, a far more functional parent than poor abused orphan Harry. I have no idea how the cast and crew manage to translate all the magical action of the script onto the stage, but it must be amazing to watch.

Also – a reminder that I still have some free one-month subscriptions to Emily Gale’s substack, Voracious, to give away. Leave a comment below if you’re interested.