Blame fairytales, blame JK Rowling, but reality often comes highly augmented in children's fiction; rarely is an animal just a dumb beast, or anything just as it seems. This batch of novels takes in the post-apocalyptic and the veil that divides the worlds; it takes metaphors and runs with them.
At the younger end of the range is a 10-year-old magic-realist take on illness, republished with arresting new artwork. The late Russell Hoban, a great believer in totems, is the author of Jim's Lion (Walker Books £9.99), a captivating words-and-pictures book full of courage and succour about a boy in hospital. Jim's nurse tells him he needs to search his dreams for a 'finder' – an animal to lead him safely out of anaesthesia. This mysterious process, full of shadows and transformation, is illustrated by Alexis Deacon with great intensity. This is no pussyfoot, but a peek into the rough and tumble of the subconscious. Hoban and Deacon's last effort, Soonchild, left me cold, but not this one.
Veteran scribe Roddy Doyle also describes recession-ravaged Dublin with words and pictures in Brilliant (Macmillan, £10.99), another younger-end book in which a fantastical animal looms very large. Children are literal creatures, and Doyle pits a pair of lippy siblings against a giant black dog made of thunderclouds and defeatism, the embodiment of the depression afflicting the city's grownups in the wake of the collapse of the Irish tiger. Brilliant began as a short story and it does feel stretched the longer it goes on, as a gang of kids races through the night-time streets, trying to outflank the beast. Randomly, one boy is a vampire. The pacing is unsatisfying, but Doyle builds characters in three dimensions, and it is leavened with plenty of gleeful, naturalistic repartee.
Has debut novelist, primary school teacher Polly Ho-Yen read The Day of The Triffids? Her excellent Boy in the Tower (Doubleday £12.99) features an influx of murderous extraterrestrial plants that can't help but recall John Wyndham's invasive species. Other elements are more original, though. This thriller that's already dystopian before it goes post-apocalyptic is set in a range of south London tower blocks. Ade is a matter-of-fact boy who does his best to hide his lone mother's crippling agoraphobia from the world, coping with the help of his friend, Gaia. Things get weird – buildings collapse, civilisation slowly grinds to a halt. An unlikely band of survivors ends holed up in the last block standing, battling killer plants that come to be known as Bluchers. This strong debut works as a page-turner and as a depiction of life in inner-city Britain, full of incomprehensible perils, quotidian heroics and unexpected resources.
The Witch of Salt and Storm (Orchard Books, £6.99) is another page-turner. We're at the very upper end of the age range here, with a passionate love story set in the late 1800s on an island on the Massachusetts coast, where generations of matrilineal witches keep the whaling fleets and the island folk safe from harm, at a price. The incumbent is Avery, a teenager ripped from her fate by a mother who scorns the craft. Avery's quest is to regain what she imagines to be her rightful place with the aid of Tane, a mysterious tattooed youth from the South Seas who packs his own magical payload.
One of the great strengths of Kendall Kulper's book is the gradual reveal: various characters' motives start out briny, then crystallise alarmingly as the story moves towards a squally denouement. The backdrop of an industry in freefall is totally compelling; you can smell the blubber boiling. But if Kulper has written an engrossing piece of historical fiction, this is an unashamedly female book, breathless in tone, where everyone is always in some heightened state of emotional turmoil when they're not at the mercy of some supernatural agitation.
Random House is billing Crog – the titular Neolithic pivot of Amanda Mitchison's latest novel (Doubleday £6.99) – as an amalgam of Stig of the Dump, the Artful Dodger and Gollum. You can see why, but this weighs down Mitchison's thoroughly contemporary yarn with references it doesn't need, and detracts from the real protagonist, kleptomaniac teenager Wilf – a poor little rich boy whose sulkiness and affability make for an intriguing mix as he sets off with this uncouth time traveller on a mission to repatriate a mystical wooden bowl.
As with The Witch of Salt and Storm, Crog establishes assumptions, then gradually trashes them as Wilf, his twin sister Ishie and Crog dodge the police and two deadly figures hunting the powerful artefact. It's an involving adventure in which the teenagers' snidey 21st-century manners keep the upper hand over the novel's more mystical aspects. Mitchison is knocking at the upper end of the age range here, with references to glue-sniffing and smoking dog-ends; there's a fairly graphic murder at each end of the book. But even with a time-travelling half-dead caveman on board, this book feels refreshingly un-fantastical. It has its feet on the ground.
