Children's Book Special: Growing up is a bit like talking to whales

The light, sensitive touch of Purkiss's writing carries it off. It's compelling

You can put all the usual ingredients into a children's novel - chase sequences, evil villains, a dash of magic, a touch of the grotesque - but still, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

Helen Dunmore's The Tide Knot (HarperCollins, £12.99) shows how it should be done. It is the second book in Dunmore's projected Ingo trilogy, but reads perfectly well as a stand-alone. Once again, Sapphire and her brother Conor enter the mysterious marine world of Ingo, where they can breathe underwater and talk to whales. There are two main strands to the plot: the mystery of why Sapphire's father vanished, and the threat to the land-dweller's world from the loosening of the Tide Knot, a weave of ocean currents guarded by the Mer people. Dunmore's graceful style is what makes the unbelievable believable here. And there's a sense that this is more than just an exciting fantasy - real dilemmas and problems confront Sapphire and Conor. I think the novel gets an extra charge from thinking of the exciting world of Ingo which Sapphire enters in her early teens as a kind of metaphor for puberty.

The Willow Man by Sue Purkiss (Walker £4.99) is another children's novel that's not afraid of the issues - in this case, disability. Eight-year-old Sophie suffers a severe stroke (there is a 1 in 50,000 chance of this happening to a child, apparently, and it happened to Sue Purkiss's own daughter). There's a danger of putting the squeamish reader off with a theme like this (and many children are squeamish readers), but the light, sensitive touch of Purkiss's writing carries it off. It's compellingly readable. The story is told from the point of view of Tom, Sophie's older brother, and is very good on the guilt, sorrow and occasional resentment he feels at his sister's condition. Both boys and girls of 10 and up would enjoy this.

John Gordon's The Giant Under the Snow (Orion £9.99) is a reprint of a novel published in 1968. It's a weird hotch-potch of the magical, the mythical and the mundane - it features a savage black dog, a magic belt buckle, scary Leather Men and little bags that you can strap on your back which enable you to fly. It is full of striking images, yet somehow it didn't carry conviction for me. I think that has to do with the quality of the writing, which is somewhat jerky and abrupt. There was one period touch I liked, though; the good fairy Elizabeth Goodenough is a chain-smoker.

Another book where the writing doesn't match up to the ideas is David Clement-Davis's The Telling Pool (Bloomsbury £12.99). This might be described as a poor man's Ivanhoe - it is set in England at the time of the Crusades, when good Richard the Lionheart is away and his bad brother John is in charge. The similarities even extend to a character called Rebecca who, like the Rebecca in Ivanhoe, is a noble and beautiful Jewess who looks as if she might provide some love interest for the hero, but who eventually yields gracefully to her Anglo-Saxon rival. There are magic ingredients aplenty - the Telling Pool, an enchanted sword and a bit of Arthurian legend - but, for me, the writing was just too clumpy.

And now two novels for older readers. Melvyn Burgess's Sara's Face (Andersen Press £9.99) is quite unlike anything else I have read this year. It's a thriller, a horror-story and a satire on celebrity. Seventeen-year-old Sara is desperate to be a star, and is lucky enough - or that's what it looks like at first - to be befriended by weird rock star Jonathon Heat. He offers to train Sara and to pay for all the plastic surgery she wants - not an attractive offer from a man who has had so much surgery himself that his face is falling to pieces, obliging him to wear a mask at all times. If this was poorly written it would merely be sickening; but Burgess writes with a sharpness, and a sympathy for the characters. For readers over 14 who enjoy being shocked.

Set In Stone by Linda Newbury (David Fickling Books £12.99) contains its fair share of shocks, too. It is a convincing evocation of late-Victorian England. Samuel Godwin, fresh out of art school, is offered the post of art tutor to the daughters of wealthy Ernest Farrow. He soon finds he has walked into a house of mysteries and sinister secrets. The story succeeds so brilliantly not through sensationalism but the virtuosity of the style. It is told in alternating chapters by Godwin and by the girls' governess, Charlotte Agnew, and exactly captures the genteel diction of Victorian times and the seething world of lust, shame and cruelty beneath it. This is a novel for young adults, but is subtle and substantial enough to be read with great pleasure and profit by older adults too.