At the risk of coming over all Mary Whitehouse, wtf? Teenagers now have to have their own dirty books and they are known in the trade as “steamies.” In my day we made do with our parents’ copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover but obviously John Thomas and all that pubic daisy threading would seem hopelessly old fashioned now. A horrible portend of what was to come emerged in a press release a couple of months back headed “Is this ‘Judy Blume for the Fifty Shades of Grey generation?’” - conveniently overlooking the fact that FSG is mostly read by sad sacks in their fifties. Irresistible by Liz Bankes, the novel to which it refers, is really no more explicit than Aidan Chambers and is not a bad read. The same could be said of Dawn O’Porter’s Paper Aeroplanes - though I guess the Nutella and oral sex scene in the kitchen (I may have juxtaposed the two in my mind) might be a first. And this is possibly the best sentence ever written about losing one’s virginity “It’s…like the time Margaret Cooper bet me to get my whole fist in my mouth. I am stuffed full. It feels as uncomfortable as it does unnatural.” It earned O’Porter a slot on Women’s Hour anyway. And though Irresistible is not a bad novel, I probably would not have mentioned it otherwise. So, yes, as a marketing ploy it obviously works. We should probably just let publishers get it out of their systems - they’ll soon tire of it. We already have. 

When I was a child the Saturday comic was the highlight of my week. I started with Harold Hare, moved on to Princess and then the upstart Diana which seduced us all with its flashy free gifts. I’ve long nurtured a nostalgia for these comics, believing them to be a cornerstone of my literary development. So leafing through a 1972 Bunty annual recently was a revelation. The first two stories are about models; then there’s Millie who lives in a tenement with her “dull, slatternly mother…. and  puny, squalling baby” and finally - this one’s a cracker - “Lazy Liza - She’s Always Eating or Sleeping” in which a father sends his chubby (they didn’t do obese in the 70s) daughter to school to learn how to walk. The teacher’s solution is to put her on a factory conveyor belt with paint jets at one end…. Of course the really sick thing is that I’m thinking Rose Budd would be WAY too fat to be a model today.

My favourite picture book hero of last year - a kind of demonic Miffy called Simon who featured in the brilliant Poo Bum - is back in Stupid Baby. New baby books follow a pattern as predictable as scheduled feeding: baby comes back from hospital, disgruntled sibling asks when it’s going back, disgruntled sibling starts acting up, baby cries and no one can settle it, until disgruntled sibling peeps over the cot and baby smiles… Stephanie Blake tells the  same fundamental story but with that essential element of sedition that turns a picture book from run of the mill to inspired. The text is as brazen as the fabulous flat colour illustrations and yet you can see every conceivable range of toddler emotion in the tiny set of Simon’s mouth and pinpoint pupils. It goes straight to the heart of sibling rivalry but does not pretend to cure it with wishy-washy sentimentality.  

There is an unwritten list of authors who will always get review space - mostly because they are just brilliant writers, have won big awards in the past or because they are “controversial.” At various points in his career Melvyn Burgess has straddled all three categories. He won the Carnegie Medal with Junk and over the years has written some great novels, though never surpassed, to my mind, the stunningly good Bloodtide. But, as if chasing his “controversial” tail, he has also written some appallingly bad, slapdash books too. (It may be no coincidence that all his best work was for Andersen Press) The Hit is a great idea, less than perfectly executed, but then the idea - as Burgess acknowledges, rather sweetly likening his role to a foster parent  - was not his own, but emerged from a conversation Barry Cunningham, publisher of Chicken House, had with two A level philosophy lecturers. The basic premise is a drug called Death, which kills you in a week but gives you the best seven days of your life. Set against a background of social unrest, riots and organised crime, one of the main problems is that this is not a convincing enough scenario to lure tens of thousands of young people to opt for Death. But even less convincing are the two main characters, Adam and Lizzie. There’s a suggestion of love across the social divide, but as usual Burgess does a lot of telling and not enough showing; “Lizzie had lived all her life safe and sound, protected by her parents’ money”. One minute she is saying fuck and the next, after days of being beaten up and sexually abused by a psychotic forty year old, she thinks to herself “Bless him” when the thoroughly uncharismatic, whiney Adam turns up to rescue her. In terms of violence this is more Guy Ritchie than Tarantino, but readers with the stomach for it will read to the end, lured by the promise of Death. And then they’ll be disappointed. So all in all, not Burgess’ best but not his worst either. Bless him.

OK, I’m not saying I would definitely have included Louis Nowra’s Into That Forest in my upcoming Easter reviews in the Sunday Telegraph if I hadn’t made the mistake of looking him up on Google and deciding I didn’t like him. And I’m not saying that every reviewer is as culpably judgemental as me (goodness, how would Martin Amis ever get any column inches if that were the case?) but as a rule it’s always best to know as little as possible about an author before reviewing a book. But Into That Forest is a curious novel - about two girls brought up in the bush by a couple of Tasmanian Tigers called, ahem, Dave and Corinna - so of course I’m going to be curious about the author’s name. Which is why I set off on the Google highway and discovered he changed it from Mark Doyle in the 1970s, no explanation given. Fair enough, he’s a writer - why shouldn’t he rewrite himself a more exotic heritage? But then I veered off on some side roads and found he had described Germaine Greer as “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”. Feeling a bit befuddled and exhausted myself I suddenly wondered whether Into That Forest was really all that good. Isn’t that faux vernacular style - “Me name be Hannah O’Brien and I be seventy-six years old”- getting a bit wearisome? Wasn’t the whaling chapter a slightly demented leap in to Moby Dick territory? And then there was the clincher. Louis Nowra’s got a chihuahua. I didn’t even have to Google that. It’s on the dustjacket - publishers probably think it makes authors sound warm and cuddly when they namecheck pets but I think it’s a big mistake. Wouldn’t you think just a little less of Dostoevsky if on the back of Crime and Punishment it said that he lived in a cosy dacha with three cats and a Vietnamese Pot Bellied Pig?

Anyone who happened to read my letter in the Guardian (OK, so you may not all be Guardian readers but it got tweeted, and retweeted until it went viral, or at least mildly infectious) about my teenage diary will know I was a bit of a narcissist. July 20 1969. “Went to Arts Centre (by myself!) in yellow cords and blouse. Ian was there but he didn’t speak to me. Got little rhyme put in my handbag from someone who’s apparently got a crush on me. It’s Nicholas I think. UGH. Man landed on moon.” With the thought that there might be a blog in my teenage perpsective on events of momentous historical significance I scoured my diaries but soon gave up.  All that “went to village/felt fed up/oh god I’m so unhappy/watched Man Alive” gets a bit monotonous over eight years of chronicling the minutiae of my minute life. But then I came across an entry so wonderfully prescient that I can’t resist posting it here. August 9 1971 “Finished just about the most perfect book I’ve ever read - The Wizard of Loneliness by John Nichols. I would like to force everyone to read it. Have read so many good books recently - think I’ll list them at back of diary so maybe when I’m older I can read and enjoy them again.” (So, yay, I wasn’t such an airhead after all…) Of course there were no such things as “young adult” novels in those days (we moved straight from E Nesbit to Colette) so these are all “grown up” books - the list includes several by Margaret Forster. I had completely forgotten that I was obsessed with one called The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff - even when I gave birth to my third child and called her Maudie the memory remained buried (just as well perhaps - Maudie would not be thrilled to think she was named after a cantankerous old woman). Most of the books are no longer in print - but in deference to my dictatorial fifteen year old self, I have ordered The Wizard of Loneliness, about which I now remember precisely nothing. Oh, and in case you’re interested - on November 8, 1969 I dyed the yellow cords grey….

Everything about Night School by C J Daughery screams Step Away From the Book. The initials (Salinger yes, everyone else no), the  dark cover featuring pale skinned, red (they’re always red) haired  beauty, and the French love interest  who “purrs” and calls our feisty – naturally – heroine “ma belle”…  It’s set in a mixed boarding school where a mysterious night school separates elite students from the plain rich. Most have a family connection but why is ordinary, mixed-up-kid Allie there? I shamefully read to the end and enjoyed every minute of it. You can safely give it to a chaste young teen – the passionate kisses always end up in one of them pulling away and saying we must be “grown up”. It’s almost Angela Brazil for the twenty first century.  

Why did I not review How the Light Gets In by M J Hyland when it was reincarnated last summer as a young adult novel for Walker Canongate? Maybe I just allowed my prejudice against authorial initials (yes, yes we all loved Catcher in the Rye but, you know, get over it) to overcome  my critical neutrality, or maybe it arrived too late for my deadline? But better late than never to hail a teen classic.

  Lou, an Australian exchange student living with an American Dream family is in equal parts fascinating and repellent. The reader sits uneasily in her head observing the front she presents to the world. Highly intelligent and clearly damaged, she is the product of an impoverished background, both materially and culturally. So she aspires to clean sheets and unconditional love and her desire to sleep in other people’s beds (preferably without the owners) is both touching and creepy as is her sensory sensitivity. On the plane coming over the old woman next to her smells of “stale vase water” while her host mother smells like “milky picnic tea poured from a flask” and the school room of “suffocated paint”. The nearest she gets to intimacy is to ask people if they know what “desquamation” is – though  of course she already knows the answer.

  Hyland’s descriptions are exquisitely wrought. The cartilages at the back of her host-sister’s knees “splay like miniature cathedral buttresses.” And a teacher has “a jagged black hairline near the front of his skull that makes him look like a shiny egg cracked open by a small and furious hatchling”. The sense of dread that dogs the reader – you know it’s not going to end well –  is counter-balanced by the sheer pleasure of reading such beautifully crafted work. I hate to say it, but I think M J Hyland has earned the right to those initials.

So, according to Claire Tomalin, today’s children don’t have the attention span for Dickens? The television’s on in the corner so we can’t really concentrate on the argument other than to say that Dickens himself, who objected to both memorialisation and cruelty to children, would not have condoned force feeding his dense prose to young readers. The truth is that some children will take to Dickens, and others won’t; it was probably exactly the same when Tomalin was at school. In the meantime, here’s our selection of titles to help them on their way.

Oliver Twisted by J D Sharpe (Electric Monkey) - the boy who asked for gore, set amidst zombies, vampires and ghouls. 

Liesl and Po by Lauren Oliver (Hodder & Stoughton )- tragic orphan, wicked stepmother, metaphysics - this lovely story for younger children has it all.

Six Days by Philip Webb (Chickenhouse) - a dystopian novel set in a richly evoked post-apocalyptic London

The Eddie Dickens Trilogy by Philip Ardagh (Faber) - ah, Mad Uncle Jack and Even-Madder Aunt Maud, Malcolm the stuffed stoat; Mrs Cruel Streak and St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans. This was the book that launched a thousand imitators and it’s still the best.

The Black Book of Secrets by F E Higgins (Macmillan). Ludlow Fitch, Jeremiah Ratchett and Joe Zabbidou - Higgins out-Dickens Dickens when it comes to names in this stylish Gothic fairy tale about a pawnbroker who buys guilty secrets.

Customer: “I’d like to return this copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

Shop: “Oh, was there something wrong with it?”

Customer: “There aren’t any Christmas carols in it.”

Unfortunately this isn’t a sketch from The Two Ronnies, or a bad cracker joke. It actually happened. Happy Christmas!