Fairy tales “are neither useful nor educational nor anything like real life.” This is the credo of Rosa’s Aunt and Uncle Monday, the mysterious relatives who show up on her doorstep after her parents’ death.
Purveyors of an artificial grass company, they believe the world is a dangerous place for little girls and say fairy tales encourage useless fantasies instead of survival skills.
Hilary McKay’s magical Rosa by Starlight (Macmillan, £12.99, 8+) has an original fairy-tale flavour of its own.
With the encouragement of a pampered cat called Balthazar – who may not be able to talk but can clearly communicate the intricacies of his inner mind – Rosa ends up on a quest to discover the buried secrets of her family’s past, which are every bit as rose-tinted as her illicit collection of fairy tales suggests.
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The happy-ever-after, however, is hard won. She must travel to Venice, retrieve a drowned kitten, a purloined €20 note and escape her horrible guardians forever.
McKay’s lyrical prose casts its own spell on the reader and the Venice setting adds an atmospheric backdrop to Rosa’s personal struggle, which is wonderfully captured in black-and-white watercolour images by Keith Robinson.
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Rosa’s shifting roster of feline co-stars is also a great part of the appeal. None of them is as memorable as the mollycoddled, food-fussy Balthazar, however. Just ask Rosa, who pays tribute to him in the final passages of the book with a touching postcard.
In Lui Sit’s Land of the Last Wild Cat (Macmillan, £7.99, 8+), the story’s heroine shares top billing with a mysterious feline too.
Ten-year-old Puffin is used to her mother’s long absences. As Head of Mysterious Animal Genetics, the mother is always travelling, searching for traces of the mythical kuri, a wildcat with healing properties who is thought to be extinct.
But when the wilful Puffin sneaks into her mother’s research lab and finds the kuri caged, she decides to do some exploration of her own.
Ecological themes are deftly woven into The Last Wild Cat, which intersects with Maori myth and the ethics of animal rights. In its respectable villain, Professor Smoult, it challenges ideas of scientific progress and in Puffin’s quest it animates an unusual island idyll where humans have left nature untouched.
Sit has written a page-turning tale that shows how even 10-year-olds can make a difference.
In Una Leavy’s stirring winter-set picture book Over the Red-Brick Chimney (O’Brien Press, £12.99, 3+), young Finn’s actions have a big impact upon an animal as well.
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As Little Goose prepares to return to the Arctic after a mild Irish winter, she finds herself lost in a snowstorm. Grandfather Goose has warned her about humans, but the hands that hold her are kind. They belong to Finn, who helps her wing heal and protects her from the noisy hens.
They become little-while friends: Little Goose must take flight again, over the red brick chimney, to return to her family.
Told from the perspective of Little Goose, this is a sweet story of child-animal connection, with wide aerial images and detailed domestic illustrations from Shannon Bergin. It offers a gentle education to migratory patterns too.
Wanda, the feisty protagonist of Karen McCombie’s World of Wanda (UCLan Publishing, £7.99, 10+) wishes someone would educate her. She moves from place to place with her mother, Patti, who likes to live as though every day is an adventure.
Children with busy brains or ADHD will find it especially relatable
Wanda, meanwhile, finds it difficult enough to keep up with the babble in her own head, her “hamster wheel of a brain”, which “rattles away at top speed”. Wanda thinks staying in one place, where she might wake up in the same bed every day and go to school, would be nice.
Structured as a series of alternating diary entries, McCombie’s clear prose places two different lives side by side. The way in which Wanda’s world will intersect with Margo’s is signposted early on, but the challenges that the two girls’ face and their appealing characters guarantee the reader’s investment anyway.
From sibling rivalry to peer rivalry, parental personalities to blended families, in World of Wanda the author demonstrates a depth of emotional engagement with the struggles of young girls to advocate for themselves in a variety of contexts. Children with busy brains or ADHD will find it especially relatable.
One Smart Cookie (Pushkin, £8.99, 5+) from Mika Song is a new graphic novel series starring sweet-loving squirrels, who will do anything to sate their appetite for tasty treats, including learn to read and write.
When they go to dig up their acorn stash and find a box of fortune cookies instead, they embark upon an adventure to ensure they have a supply to last them for the rest of winter.
The dashed-line drawings and quirky characters are set against simple backdrops to animate each scenario, including ninja disguises and a factory break-in, providing guaranteed laughs for the emerging reader.
