If you’ve ever wanted to know where dreams come from, or how poems and songs sometimes well up from deep inside us, then read The Awesome Bird. You may find, like Laurie B O’Grady, that you are one of the “glinting people”, the “people who catch the light” and who belong both Here and There. You may even conjure visions of Rabobab, the mysterious Island of Dreams and Song, and glimpse the faint outline of a tell-tale bluebird tattoo.

“Never say no to an adventure” is something 10-year-old Laurie has read somewhere and he really hankers after colour and excitement in what he considers his grey life. It arrives with the magical Susan Smiley and Ginger - and the great white bird who visits Laurie’s window-sill at night. Laurie seizes his adventure even though it should have been Ginger who rode away to Rabobab on the back of the awesome bird. Urgent action is called for and Mrs O’Grady, Puddles, the dog, Susan and Ginger have to summon the bird to carry them to the island and rescue Laurie before his memory of the Worldly World is washed away in the Sea of Forgetting.

It is refreshing to read a charming fantasy which eschews the horror and coarse tendencies of many children’s books today. But be assured that this is a pacy story with some down-to-earth characters and language, all as well-written as one would expect from Diana Hendry. Apart from being an award-winning children’s novelist, she is a poet, so we can be fairly sure that in the back of her mind were O’Shaughnessy‘s lines: “We are the music-makers,And we are the dreamers of dreams”. She quotes, however, from Byron: “How little we know that which we are!How less what we may be!” Those lines, with their idea of being caught between two worlds and of not knowing what possibilities we have within us, might just as appropriately have been the epigraph for Malorie Blackman’s Thief!. Wrongly accused of stealing the school sports cup, 12-year-old Lydia Henson becomes an outcast and runs away. But does she really travel through time to a future where hatred rules and where she must confront the bitterness in her adult self? Or does her inner voice work through her imagination as she lies unconscious on the moors?

Thief! is an exciting and ambitious story which looks at the concept of time and shows how present actions can set off a train of events which may decide the future. Lydia learns, though, that nothing is inevitable and we can change what will happen. The book also portrays a very realistic picture of bullying and the victimisation of a newcomer to a close-knit community. Behind the fast-moving adventure, and the gadgets and gizmos of the 21st century, however, lies a moral tale which successfully raises important issues about conscience, society and human behaviour.

There are also some sharp comments on everyday life under the surface of Dakota of the White Flats: pollution, ubiquitous supermarket trolleys, the dreams of people whose lives seem sad and lonely. But the fantasy here is less coherent and more surreal.

Dakota and her friend, Treacle, have to fight off mutant killer eels and the romantic novelist, Lassiter Peach, in order to rescue the diamond-encrusted turtle from Dog Island so that Medusa can go to Hollywood with her Prince Charming.

The story is a lively romp and would have been more likable if it had not descended to the bogiessmelly sockstoe-jam level of some of the language.