New and shiny vs back to the classics...

I don't generally rush out to buy the latest in children's and YA fiction. Partly because new hardbacks are expensive and partly because as a writer I prefer to read 'classics' of the genre that have stood the test of the years. Also there are a million other  'pro' bloggers out there reviewing the latest big books. I'll make an exception for an author that I particularly like, and happily for Amazon, there have been a few of these lately.
So I thought I'd review those I enjoyed and also recommend some classics with a similar 'feel'

Rebecca Stead's When you Reach Me won a Newbery Medal and deservedly so. Her latest is also very, very good, deftly plotted, Georges the hero has a great voice, the book is packed full of quirky characters and absent parents in a sort of busy artsy Brooklyn milieu. A little bit The Royal Tannnenbaums for kids (but less annoying).

If you like this you might like:

Harriet the Spy        Louise Fitzhugh's classic of New York neglected rich kids
The Saturdays          Elizabeth Enright. Simply the best New York story ever
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William Mckinley and me, Elizabeth  by EL Konigsburg. Weird but wonderful see here 

Catherine Fisher is a wonderful fantasy writer and this is a breakneck whizz through evil fairies and time travel with a dash of Victoriana and country house mystery thrown in. The pace is frantic but Fisher's writing is so astounding that  I  was swept along. This is the first of the trilogy and it's a mark of her talents that you close the book satisfied despite the fact that many of the mysteries she has set up are unanswered. Who is the scarred man? What really happened to Jake's father? Aaaargh! Cannot. Wait. For. Next. Book.
You might also like:

Charmed Life & A Tale of Time City             Diana Wynne Jones
A Wrinkle in Time                                            Ursula le Guin

Maggie Stiefvater's latest is probably older, more 'YA' than the two above, a girl named Blue who lives in a family of mediums, a bunch of teenage  boys at an elite boarding school and a more-than-healthy dose of Celtic myth, ghosts and dead bodies mixed in. Yet somehow it works, despite the disparate elements, again due to the quality of Stiefvater's writing. First of four.

If you haven't already read:

The Secret History               Donna Tartt
Prep                                    Curtis Sittenfeld
Alice Hoffman's  brand of Southern Gothic magic realism, she has written for both adults and children.

Sir Terry needs no introduction but this is a departure for him, a crazy, digressional 'historical' fantasy with guest appearances by Charles Dickens Henry Mayhew and Sweeney Todd no less. Sir Terry wears his heart and politics proudly on his lapel here and I love him all the more for it, though I'm not sure younger readers will get all the references, including those to a certain hot-tempered young man named Karl...

If you liked Dodger you will certainly like Joan Aiken's brand of alt history particularly the later books in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence  and Midnight is a Place.