Kids Book Club - September

0-4 years
The Highway Rat
Julia Donaldson / Axel Scheffler
9781407124377
£10.99

THE Gruffalo is undeniably a modern classic, but the Donaldson/Scheffler team is no one-trick pony. In fact their latest collaboration is one of their best. A neat riff on the classic narrative poem The Highwayman, it filches the source's unique rhythms but the titular rapscallion is rendered here in rodent form. Every animal he comes across ends up hungry and on the ropes, until he encounters a particularly canny rabbit. Fittingly, this gallops along, full of the team's trademark zip, wit and colour both in the text and the visuals. It's a memorable, satisfying little tale, and it's probably not spoiling it to say that by the final page the rat gets exactly what's coming to him.

4-6 years
Marshall Armstrong is New to Our School
David Mackintosh
9780007361427
£6.99

BEING the new boy at school can be hard work. Every five year old knows exactly how that feels. This striking new picture book tells the tale of a geeky little boy who joins a class late. Marshall has a particularly well-stocked pencil case, wears peculiar clothes and needs a special diet. His new classmates are wary of him, and blanch when they're invited to his birthday party. What weirdness lies in wait for them there? Perhaps though, on the day, young Marshall will win them all over...

Elaborately illustrated in an eccentric and winningly retro style, this engaging little yarn demonstrates that there's nothing wrong with being different - and you're never too young to learn that.

6-8 years
Penny Dreadful is a Magnet for Disaster
Joanna Nadin
9781409526728
£4.99

IN many respects Nadin's Penny Dreadful is a girls' answer to Horrid Henry. In each of the three mini-stories contain herein, Penny can't help but cause trouble. At heart, she's a sweet thing, but her over-active imagination gets her into all manner of scrapes, whether acting as her cousin's hairdresser, kidnapping a neighbourhood dog,  or causing a whole wave of chaos while the school inspector is visiting. Told from Penny's own chatty first-person perspective, with oodles of illustrations, this is lively, sparky stuff, even down to the variety of fonts and typefaces. Truly there's never a dull moment, and it should hold the attention of even the most easily-distracted readers. Penny Dreadful is a Complete Catastrophe, the next volume in the series, is due out this month too.

9-12 years
We Can Be Heroes
Catherine Bruton
9781405256520
£6.99

IT'S startling to think that today's new Young Adult readers weren't even born when the Twin Towers were attacked. This attempts to illustrate the enormity of those events, and their consequences, for those too young to have experienced them. But it's actually a small-scale novel about families, communities and characters, away from the eye of the storm. Ben's father was killed in the attacks, and consequently his mother has had a breakdown. Now Ben is staying with relatives in the UK, where he befriends a  couple of young neighbours, including an irrepressible Muslim girl. The gang decide, as only youngsters can, that they're on the trail of a local suicide bomber, but it turns out it's not remotely that straight-forward. Deftly handling such weighty matters as intolerance and grief, but never becoming worthy with it, at nearly 500 pages this is a hefty read, but a very engaging, satisfying and often surprisingly funny one.


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