Teen fiction round-up: A heady mix of magic, arson, and unplanned infants

From Hilary McKay's Binny in Secret to Jon Walter's My Name's Not Friday

Kidulthood: reading in the summer holidays (Corbis)

Hilary McKay's Binny in Secret (Hodder, £10.99) is aptly named, given that this enchanting novelist still remains something of a secret to a mass audience. The natural heir to E.Nesbit and Dodie Smith, she describes the various mini-adventures of childhood and family life with so sure a touch it is as if those concerned are in the next room. Bright 12-year-old Binny may seem young for a main character in a teenage novel, but her company is consistently sparky without ever lapsing into the irritatingly cute.

Her older sister, mother and younger brother make up the cast as she struggles with a new school she hates and is puzzled by some

unidentifiable footprints in the garden. An accompanying story told in tandem takes the action back 100 years to another outspoken pre-teenage girl once living in the same house. The link-up between past and present is as skillfully done as everything else in this accomplished novel.

Adult as well as adolescent readers in search of a story where everyday life is periodically still rendered almost magical need look no further.

No such harmonies in Jenny Valentine's Fire Colour One (HarperCollins, £8.99). Teenage Iris, brought up in America, has returned to the UK. This is so that her appalling mother and venal step-father can grab all the cash they can from Ernest, Iris's wealthy art-dealing father, who has only a few weeks to live. Fed a series of lies about her past, Iris has no wish to see him, preferring memories of her semi-detached American boy-friend instead.

This rather shadowy personage encouraged her love of lighting fires, however dangerously, and then settling down to admire the blaze. This temptation remains until father Ernest, battling through the life-saving medical devices with which he is now surrounded, tells her what really happened in the past.

Iris's mother, a failed actress with unaccountably high opinions of herself, tries her best to break up this relationship. Her final come-uppance is the comic high point of this brilliantly written story whose only fault is a plot sometimes too tightly boxed in to allow characters to develop further.

Novels about teenage pregnancies, rather than acting as the literary equivalent of the morning after pill, generally picture life with a new unplanned infant in a largely favourable light. Lisa Drakeford's The Baby (Chicken House, £7.99) is no exception, with 17-year old Nicola making an excellent fist of things after the unforeseen birth of Eliza on her best friend's bathroom floor in the middle of a party.

Told from five different points of view, the story also ropes in a gay male best friend – a regular character in teen fiction these days – another adolescent boy with major anger management problems and a younger sister with Asperger's, who is having a hard time at school. Written with urgency and style, this is good stuff if at times a shade sentimental. But there's nothing soft in Jon Walter's magnificent My Name's Not Friday (David Fickling, £12.99). Set in the American Civil War, this is the story of Samuel, a kidnapped black American orphan illegally sold into slavery. Told as if by himself, it spares readers some of the worst excesses of working on a Mississippi slave plantation, given that its owner retains some streaks of humanity.

The growing boy just survives until finally escaping, drawing on his previously acquired literacy skills and also on his tenacious religious faith. Powerfully told, with Samuel only occasionally lapsing into today's teenage speech, this story once read will surely never be forgotten.