Yaxley's Cat by Robert Westall, The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall, Before Wings by Beth Goobie & What I Was by Beth Rosoff

These four books are all children's ficition, the first two for slightly younger readers than the latter two.  It strikes me that for children's fiction to work the parentals have to be got rid of, Yaxley's Cat doesn't, for me, work because it is written not from the point of view of the two children who, frankly, come across as pretty awful, but from their mother's point of view. 

Having loved his Blitzcat I liked the look of the story in Yaxley's Cat, mother on holiday with two children exploring in Norfolk come across an abandoned cottage and get permission to live in it.  They are soon joined a cat that they find out belonged to the previous owner, Yaxley.  As they find out more about the mysterious Mr Yaxley, his unexplained disappearance years earlier and as they meet the people of the local village horror and the terrible truth begin to be revealed.

In The Kingdom by the Sea Westall draws on his childhood experiences during World War II.  Harry has just made the run down his garden from his house in Newcastle to the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden when a bomb makes a direct hit on his house and, pulled from the wreckage of the shelter, he takes off, reluctant to live with his repugnant Aunt Elsie.  Grief stricken he draws on the common sense drilled into him by his Air Warden father and finds shelter under a boat on a beach and company in the figure of a lost dog that, without him, would be put down.  Like a pilgrim he moved steadily north along the Northumberland coastline to Holy Island, meeting a wonderful range of characters and having to leave as people begin asking questions about him or paying him unwanted attention, until after a disastorous trip to Lindisfarne where he finds himself cut off by the tide crossing the causeway he finally finds refuge with a man broken by the loss of his son in Malay at only age 18.  But the refuge is not permanent, and Westall's powers in this book are at their height, deliniating Harry's experiences exquisitely.

In Before Wings 15 year old Adrien's release from her parents is through them leaving her with her aunt Erin at summer camp, freed to discover the usual teenage book preoccupation of dawning love and challenging emotions, but with the added element that Adrien had a near fatal brain aneurysm two years earlier and ever since has been stuck between the worlds of the living and dead, able to see the dead and perilously close to joining them.  In Before Wings Adrien learns to live again rather than just waiting for the weakened blood vessels in her brain to give again, and observes and solves the mystery of the five girl ghosts haunting the summer camp and her aunt.  Well written.

Lastly, in What I Was the release come through being at boarding school and is the memories of a Hilary, a man in old age remembering events in 1962 when he met and fell in love with Finn, a boy his own age living alone in a tiny hut on an island near by his school.  The fact that it is clear that the man writing this memoir is recalling personal history with deep pain and regret adds to the aching tenderness of this powerful story and the sense that tragedy is sure to strike long before it does.