Marvin Redpost Class President - Louis Sachar

Marvin gets a crush, fogets to go shoe shopping and gets visited by the President.

Grandpa's Indian Summer - Jamila Gavin

Light-hearted stories about two British children who go to visit relatives in India for th summer - cricketing, river-bathing and yoga all feature. Good descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of Calcutta. Exploration of similarities and difference, notion of culture-shock.

Skellig - David Almond

Shades of magic realism (cf Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus). Michael has moved house, Mum and Dad are preoccupied with the sick baby and renovations. The half-dead man in the condemned garage just wants a Chinese and a bottle of Newky Brown...

Enter Mina, the precocious home-schooled neighbour and her free-spirited mother, on hand to dispense modelling clay and liberal wisdom. Phew.

This is a genuinely well-written book and deals sensitively with emotional issues from a male perspective.

Varjak Paw - S F Said

Really evocative writing, kittens and gang culture! Varjak's the ugly duckling in a snooty family of pedigree cats, bullied by his brother, he feels like an outsider. His only ally is the Elder Paw who is killed saving Varjak from The sinister Gentleman and his suspiciously expressionless cat henchmen.

Varjak leaves the only home he's ever known for the mean streets of the city, where he makes friends and learns a lot about self-reliance. Several dream sequences in which he returns to Mesopotamia with an ancestor to learn The Way - would work well as egs for writing with all the senses. The Way is full of moral lessons, as are Varjak's interactions with the street cats. Comedy comes from Varjak's innocence of the outside world - he thinks cars are dogs. Varjak's later friendship with Cludge, a fearsome-looking, but kind-hearted dog also a good model.

The London Eye Mystery - Siobhan Dowd

Two Weeks with the Queen - Morris Gleitzman

Comic narrative voice, AIDS and cancer both dealt with sensitively, child's experience of hospital / authority figures, child's first meeting with gay couple, sibling rivalry (and love).

School Swaps - a nice idea

http://www.schoolswaps.net/