"That chicken had guts," remarked a child as he left the cinema after watching the film Chicken Run. Guts are important to children, whether they're taking their first unaccompanied bus ride, or facing a bully in the playground. Gutsy, inspirational fictional characters abound - some subtler than others.

Because of Winn-Dixie (Walker, £7.99), by Kate DiCamillo, ambles through an important period for Opal, recently moved to Florida with her fond but preoccupied preacher father. She adopts an ugly but engaging stray dog who befriends anybody and everybody, thereby effecting introductions for Opal. The responsibility she feels for Winn-Dixie contrasts with her absent mother's irresponsibility. Her father's reticence on the subject masks his undoubted pain, a sadness which Opal helps him admit. Episodic and gently meandering, this snapshot of small-town life is touching and affecting.

While Opal patiently teases out the disparate strands of her life, Sophie, in Sharon Creech's The Wanderer (Macmillan, £10.99) wrestles with hers. Straddling action adventure and rights-of-passage, this novel uncovers several wardrobes-ful of skeletons. Sophie could simply continue to ignore the half-facts with which she has grown up, but a trans-Atlantic sailing trip shakes everybody up, literally and metaphorically. Vivid writing, with powerful emotional undertow.

The sea provides the backdrop to Nigel Hinton's hard-hitting novella, Ship of Ghosts (Barrington Stoke, £3.99) . Mick opts for a seafaring life, during which he meets a man who apparently tells him everything about the adored father he has never met. Disillusionment is all the more crushing when he eventually realises that the stories are false. Events take a terrible turn, and Mick is left haunted. Economical and pacey, this is compelling reading.

Any reader of Sarah Withrow's Bat (Bloomsbury, £4.99) might argue for a substitution of "weird" for "gutsy" when describing the central, quasi-eponymous character, Lucy, utterly convinced that she is a bat. She persuades Terence that there is something to her claim, and the two develop a friendship that says as much for his guts as hers. In his head he knows that she is wrong, but his heart tells him that he must support her. Suspend any disbelief and rest assured that readers won't easily forget this extraordinary story.

Dear Olly (Collins, £9.99), Michael Morpurgo's latest novel, evokes no such dislocation. He has mastered the art of telling sensational stories with lyrical simplicity, here using musical form as the structural framework. Matt's decision to go to Africa to make desperate children laugh is classic Morpurgo - flying in the face of sense and expectation, but utterly laudable. The gutsy migration of swallows - which shows Nature triumphantly flouting any sense of practicality - provides a bridge between suburban Britain and war-torn Africa, until tragedy brings Matt home. Gut-wrenching and beautifully told.

Tough Stuff (Allen & Unwin, £4.99) offers true stories about children with guts. Grouping them under such headings as Rescuers, Rebels, Battlers and Ferals, this is no literary classic but it merits wide exposure. The reader ricochets between breathless admiration and silent awe, proving my point that guts come in all shapes, sizes and decibel levels. They keep minds and pages turning.