The year’s best children’s books, featuring animals real and imaginary

It’s not often that my tastes are validated by Netflix, but Jonathan Stroud’s brilliant series about teenage ghost hunters, Lockwood & Co., is being turned into a series. If you haven’t read it, give it a go. The mordant talking skull alone is worth it. Stroud has already embarked on another series about a tough nut sharp-shooter, Scarlett, and her amiable sidekick, Albert Browne, who, handily, can read or sieve minds.  

The Notorious Scarlett & Browne: Being an Account of the Fearless Outlaws and their Infamous Deeds (Walker Books, £7.99) is the second in the series, and the subtitle gives the gist. Here they carry out an impossible heist, complicated by ghouls. I say this even though I take a dim view of the underlying premise – that the bogey in the Britain where it all happens is the Faith Houses, an all-encompassing religious institution with sinister operatives. It’s a rubbish notion, given that Christianity has generally made us kinder and more humane, and I have limited patience with a heroine whose way of recharging is to meditate on a prayer mat, but it’s a rattling story. And in contemporary youth literature there aren’t many of those around.

Actually, here’s another. Lauren Wolk was shortlisted for the Carnegie Prize – admittedly not quite the accolade it once was – for Wolf Hollow, about a young girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania during the war and her efforts to save an unfortunate loner from the malice of an unscrupulous newcomer. The sequel, My Own Lightning (Penguin, £7.99), features the same heroine. When she’s struck by lightning it leaves her with a curious sense of how animals feel, including dogs, which have mysteriously disappeared from the neighbourhood. It’s about how mistaken our perceptions can be, and casts one of the villains of Wolf Hollow in an altogether different light.