All children love dragons. Why this is so is the subject of much discussion. Perhaps it’s because they really are an incarnation of a Jungian archetype, an innate part of our humanity. Or maybe it’s just because they’re enormous and breathe fire. In any case, Cressida Cowell knows their appeal. How to Train Your Dragon School: Doom of the Darkwing (Hodder Children’s Books 256pp £7.99) sees Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, her delightfully weedy hero, return to the Isle of Berk, where he is being trained. The setting is a Viking-tinged, dragon-filled world. Hiccup’s brutish teachers think he should spend less time thinking, and more time polishing his axe. Thankfully, the intellectual Hiccup doesn’t take note.

The exciting plot sees Hiccup setting out to rescue his friend Camicazi (who has ‘the cheek of a hundred foxes’) with the help of his pet dragon companion, Toothless, quite possibly the best animal creation this side of the Psammead – cunning, sweet and unpredictable. Toothless’s exchanges with Hiccup in Dragonese are priceless (a glossary in the back of the book will instruct you in this language). To apologise is to ‘criss cross blather’; a human is a ‘no-brainer’. Delighting in wordplay, Cowell also satirises the credulity of crowds, and hails the defeat of the powerful by the weak through intelligence and bravery. This book will absolutely hoogly ankle-biters (delight children) of eight and up with its Molesworthian anarchy.

More charming anthropomorphic creatures can be found in The Narzat and the Shifting Shadow by Luke Marchant (Everything with Words 222pp £8.99). The Narzat, an odd, furry little thing, lives in the Jumble Jungle, where land piranhas and Velcro vultures abound. The book opens with one of the more striking phenomena I’ve encountered in children’s fiction recently: a pirate ship sailing over the treetops. Its deadly boss is Captain Carver, a masked villain who only appears at night. Naturally, he and his rat minions have villainous intent.

The book replays the Medusa myth in an engagingly original manner: the Narzat and his companions face up to the Gorgonconda with nothing but cooking utensils. Marchant is a head teacher at a primary school and clearly knows his onions. The book bursts with silly puns and inventive language. For instance, a gorilla (called, incidentally, Pertinax) ‘grumbered over to the well’. Yet the novel is also about kindness defeating cruelty, families reuniting and the triumph of truth over falsehood. Children of eight and up will cheer on its ramshackle, eccentric heroes. 

For the same age group is Andy Shepherd’s The Wood Where Magic Grows (Piccadilly Press 288pp £7.99). This is a charming, Enid Blyton-inflected eco-fable about a magical forest and its survival. Iggy, thoughtful and imaginative, has moved to a thatched cottage, where the wooden ornaments take on a life of their own. The cottage’s owner, Sylvie, whose name bespeaks her interests, talks to the trees. And well she might, as they’re sentient. 

A blight is gradually destroying the wood; also ranged against it are the forces of bureaucracy and development. Shepherd delights in nature and her writing is deeply rooted (if you will excuse the pun) in folklore, with May Day and Jack on the Green making appearances. The book also touches on friendship and humanity’s stewardship of the planet. Like Blyton, who was trained in the Froebel method of pedagogy, Shepherd knows the benefits of wildness to a child’s development.

For older readers is Luke Palmer’s Live (Firefly Press 356pp £9.99). A coming-­of-age story set in the real world, it follows a teenage rock group as its members reach the end of the sixth form and prepare to go to university. A car crash caused by a drunken driver in which one of the band members dies is the engine of the plot. Meanwhile, the boys stumble in their love lives and in their growing sense of who they are and what they want to be. 

Palmer has a sure grasp of the manner in which boys talk to each other: their WhatsApp messages, full of banter and spattered with insults, are spot on. He’s excellent, too, on the grand schemes of adolescents – how they dream of success and how they can self-sabotage spectacularly.

In rhythmic, involving prose, Palmer brings some of the more troubling aspects of modern teen life into the narrative without allowing them to dominate the story. He is acutely aware of the damage pornography can cause young men, and also of the perils of social media. Really, though, it’s music that moves the book. Palmer writes about rock music in a way that captures its raw appeal perfectly and understands the exquisite rush performance can provide. Live, with its attention to teen dynamics and its quietly elegiac tone, will win prizes.

Also very much for older teens is Bryony Pearce’s Aphrodite (UCLan Publishing 372pp £8.99), which boasts an intriguing concept. Aphrodite, as we all know, was born from the foam that sprang from Uranus’s genitals after his castration. So how did this mighty, Titan-adjacent goddess become a mere Olympian, under Zeus’s electric thumb? 

Pearce’s Aphrodite is part sea-monster. Crawling out from the waves, she discovers she can grow tentacles at will. There is something touching about her in the early part of the novel, as she learns about the world she’s been ejected into, and about humanity and its fickle ways. It’s rare to see Ares depicted sympathetically, yet here he comes to Aphrodite’s aid and she falls for his slick, charming ways (yes,
really, even if he does glory in violence). Olympus is a ‘snake-pit’, with its own spin doctor in the shape of Athena, and the psychopathic gods talk like American teens. Sulky and possessive, they want to control Aphrodite, and attempt to do so by making her marry Hephaestus, who lives in a giant, steam-punky palace full of discarded machinery. She rebels, going in search of her chthonic origins.

If you wanted to, you could call this a feminist retelling. I prefer to think of it as a gripping reworking of an ancient tale, written with skill and more than a sprinkling of wit, as well as deep knowledge of the classics. And Pearce gets top marks for using Greek lettering in the chapter titles.