The Lion’s Mane, the Firework and terrible jellyfish jokes: the year’s best children’s books

Philip Reeve roams across realms of his own making with effortless brio. If I say that Thunder City (Scholastic, £8.99) is based on the premise that the world’s great cities have detached themselves from their terrestrial foundations and are floating across the sky like so many urban space ships, swallowing up smaller fry, you’d probably think this is asking a bit much of the reader, but somehow you take it all on board. In this futuristic scenario the characters and their modes of thinking are in fact rather quaint – like Miss Torpenhow, a governess whose floating town of Thorbury has been captured by a diabolical former protégé. The assurance of the storytelling carries you along.

Rick Riordan has invented an entire genre: Greek myth crossed with American teenage comedy. Percy Jackson (son of Poseidon) has the angst of a young New Yorker in a city in which his tutor is a centaur. His Halloween assignment, along with his semi-divine girlfriend Annabeth and his satyr friend Grover, is to pet-sit Hecuba, a hell hound belonging to the witch goddess Hecate. At his best, Riordan can be very funny. Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Puffin, £16.99) is one of his good ones.

Contemporary stories about the second world war often miss the mark, but Chris Vick’s Shadow Creatures (Zephyr, £8.99) is a cracker. It’s a version of real events, based on his family’s history and the story of Norway after the German invasion. The Nazi takeover of schools, the hardships of occupation and the boy smuggling resistance propaganda in loaves of bread had me gripped.

There’s always something new out of Africa in the way of rattling youth fiction, and When It’s Your Turn for Midnight by Blessing Musariri (Zephyr, £8.99)