Books I was too old for, first time round...

did anyone ever read Nicholas Fisk?  when i was a kid i remember reading 'Space Hostages', 'Robot Revolt', 'Grinny' and 'Trillions' - taking them out of Newton Aycliffe library. They seemed just *enough* like the Doctor Who books I'd run out of. Now i'm catching up with a Fisk that came out after I'd passed that age (the first time) - 'On the Flip Side', and it's just wonderful.

At first it's about a girl, Lettice, who can speak to her pets - and then, very quickly, it turns into a novel of impending global catastrophe. It turns out that the animals are all being menaced by... giant, semi-transparent, stripy Blobs. Doctor Kalabza - a wildly eccentric TV personality - is one of the first to believe Lettice's ideas - landing his helicopter in her garden and inviting her onto TV to tell the world about what's really going on.

It's written so beautifully - and, though my description has made it sound ridiculous - it's carried out with utter seriousness. The scenes with Lettice talking to her dog and other animals are actually very touching - filled with her compassion for them, and her sense of the limits of their perceptions.

Another YA author I have been completely bowled over by this year so far is Betsy Byars. Someone i never read when i was young - simply because i wouldn't have been allowed to take 'girls' books' out of the library! She's a wonderful writer. Somehow her language, her sentences - the twists that her characters' thoughts take - they are extremely accurate. They're so *true.* Recently I've read The Cartoonist, The TV Kid and The Midnight Fox - the last of which was my favourite, and one I know I'll go back to. Yesterday I was delighted to find that the majority of her work was published on Kindle - just last week! (A little bit pricily, compared with most kindle books - but never mind.)