Who Framed Klaris Cliff? by Nikki Sheehan

An intriguing book perfect for 8-12 year olds.  Joseph lives in a world where there has been a terrible incident and imaginary friends are considered a potential lethal threat rather than a harmless childhood phase.   He lives with his dad, his mum disappeared two years earlier after sending a postcard from Spain saying she would be back in the summer.

Joseph's neighbours are the sprawling Cliff family, best friend Rocky, older sister Pooh, the odd and vaguely wicked twins Egg and Willis and Flea.  Flea has an imaginary friend Klaris but she has begun speaking to Joseph and Flea's parents call the authorities convinced that Klaris is potentially dangerous.  Flea's dad has drawn up a list of the things he believes Klaris has done, including getting the family labradors drunk, killing the pet rabbit, writing on door and turning lights on.  The way that imaginary friends are dispatched is by isolating and destroying the imagination centres of the brain, and Joseph is quick to realise that this will mean he will lose all his memories of his mother.  It is now a race against time to prove that Klaris is not guilty of Flea's father's list of misdemeanors.

This was a good sweet story and I loved the ending.

Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale

A boy is brought to the house of his grandfather, a bleak tenament flat in a Belarussian town.  His mother is dying of cancer and has brought her son to live with her father.  Slowly, reluctantly, Grandfather, or Papa, begins to tell the boy and mother the stories he told to her as a child.  Of Baba Yaga, the deep forests, and of the mighty Winter King and the King in the West who fought a terrible war over Belarus when it was Poland.

The mother's dying wish is for her ashes to be scattered with those of her mother in the great ancient forest beyond the town.  Grandfather, or Papa, is deeply reluctant but on a day when the roads are deep in ice he relents and takes the boy and his mother's remains out to a near ruined house.  It becomes clear that Papa is not afraid of the forest, he is afraid of not wanting to leave it.  Daily Papa remains in the house only venturing to collect the boy from school, then one day he does not come and the boy goes in search of him.

It is the beginning of a stunning magical cartwheeling story where boy and grandfather leave the urban for the wild and enter a world of stories, of partisan fighters who retreated to safety among the trees, of women and children massacred and the trees that drank too deeply of their blood and have become wicked, of survival, and love.

Dinsdale weaves the two parts of his story - narrative and folklore, together in such a skillful way that both drive each other.  Crises come, injury, new people in the forest, decisions to be made over loyalty, faithfulness and friendship, but always the ancient forest full of wildlife is a world beyond narrative where the past and present are bound together.

Iron Council by China Mieville

Mieville's conclusion to the Perdido Street Station trilogy is dense, magical, bewildering and brilliant.  Out in the wastes beyond New Crobuzon a rag tag band  searches for the legendary Iron Council, a train taken by rebels into the wilderness when the City refused to pay their wages.  In New Crobuzon unrest is rife and the people are in covert revolt against their authoritarian rulers, themselves at war against the mysterious Tesh, and the two strands come into painful contact

Mieville introduces us to an incredible cast:  Remade, people punished by the authorities by being surgically altered to be part machine; their rebel counterparts the fReemade; magicians; golems; all manner of creatures part bird, bat and insect; stomach churning spells, the visceral urban grit of New Crobuzon and the bewildering landscape outside where smoke turns to stone petrifying its victims and nothing is fixed.  And all this in an opaque bewitching language that often had me reaching for the dictionary.  Worth the work though.