Short takes: Kids' books

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

V.M. Jones: The Serpents Of Arakesh

"Very, very, very, very good." That's my son Jack (favourite writers: J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Mahy), reporting on Jones' new novel. Jones has attracted a great deal of attention with her two young adult novels Buddy and Juggling With Mandarins, but this is her first venture into children's fantasy. I can see why Jack loved it. An orphan boy, hopeless at school, friendless, enters a competition. First prize: helping to design a new computer game. The game's fantasy world turns out to be less fictional than our hero had supposed. There's abundant wish-fulfilment appeal in this concept, and Jones knows precisely what to do with it. Superb writing, intelligent story telling, it's part one of four.

(HarperCollins, $14.99)

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Ted Dawe: Thunder Road

This is Auckland writer Ted Dawe's first novel - the first, I hope, of many. Nineteen-year-old Trace, desperate to escape his small-town Waikato roots, heads to Auckland and ends up rooming with a street-racer. The pleasures of speed, out-facing the competition, out-thinking the cops, soon have Trace caught - and they caught me, too. Dawe's combination of fast-paced plotting and terse, punchy prose should guarantee this a substantial adult readership, but its real appeal will be to teenagers. Dawe doesn't so much speak their language as take hold of it and turn it into something new, a kind of poetry of the street. As the story darkens, with Trace and his mate Devon setting themselves up as dope dealers to fund their racing, readers young and old will find themselves turning the pages faster and faster. Half coming-of-age story, half thriller, this is a strikingly impressive debut.

(Longacre, $18.95)

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Tessa Duder: Tiggie Tompson's Longest Journey

If you were eager to start a debate over good girl/bad boy stereotypes, you could find a lot of ammunition in a comparison between Ted Dawe's book and the latest from Tessa Duder. But both books offer such strong, detailed character writing that anyone who reads them will find their ability to see teenagers in terms of stereotypes seriously undermined. This third volume in Duder's Tiggie Tompson trilogy has the heroine moving from Auckland to Brisbane to act in a television drama. Her boyfriend has a job on the set, one of her co-stars is distractingly handsome, her unstable half-brother is playing an extra ... and her mother's pregnant. Duder's smooth, easy writing is pure pleasure to read, and every sentence manages to put Tiggie's personality across in ways you hardly notice. Over the course of three books, Tiggie has acquired a lot of back-story, and in Duder's hands, this is an asset. The richly complex plot is never bogged down in too much detail, and it has the well-grounded feel of lived reality.

(Penguin, $16.95)

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Julia Owen: Beneath the Surf

Yasmin's family is off to the beach, her first real summer holiday. Her main ambition: to acquire a proper boyfriend. But her Dad, who has been spending all his time at work, announces he isn't coming and Yasmin starts to realise something is wrong. There's something slightly programmatic about this book, in that you can sum it up with the single sentence: teenager comes to terms with parents' divorce. But there's a place for good single-issue books, and Julia Owen is a readable writer.

(Scholastic, $15.99)

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Shirley Corlett: Abandon Ship!

Scholastic's My Story series is dedicated to bringing New Zealand history alive for kids, and on the evidence, it's a successful project. Shirley Corlett's volume pulls off a clever double, focusing simultaneously on a famous disaster and the arrival of immigrants to New Zealand two generations earlier. Our narrator is Debbie Atherton, a typical Kiwi schoolgirl in 1968, who starts out to record her daily routine in her diary. But Debbie discovers another diary, belonging to her dead grandfather, telling how he survived the trip out from Europe. Then she goes on a trip of her own - on the Wahine. Early teens and pre-teens will find a lot to identify with, and a lot of fascinating points of difference.

(Scholastic, $15.99)