The aliens arrive in a great big mothership and things don't work out too good for us. Three waves of diabolically long-distance remote control mass slaughter later, and we're down to a handful of survivors who still aren't quite sure what hit them. Then the fourth wave comes along and starts picking off the survivors and setting things up for the fifth wave, which might seem like overkill, but as with any big cleaning job it's getting into those tight corners that takes ages.

Cassie Sullivan has lost most of her family except her brother, Sammy, and she's not really sure about him. She gets shot in the leg and stranded in the boot of a car during a blizzard and it seems like curtains for her until a strapping young farmer boy rescues her and takes her home. Meanwhile her old school crush is being indoctrinated into an army of children to strike back against the aliens, and the newest member of his squad is a kid called Sammy.

Horror and violence and death and destruction and more death and killing and death. That's what you get in the 5th Wave. It's grim stuff and the characters have to deal with grief and despair and PTSD by the barrelfull. But it's smoothly written, pacy as hell, undeniably exciting and compelling. There's troubling stuff there to do with the imagery of genocide and child soldiers and aliens-as-implacable-hostile-forces, and using these in a post-apocalyptic romp, but it doesn't feel particularly rompy, to be fair. There's hints of a developing love triangle of conflicted loyalities, but, I dunno, the whole thing seemed to work and I bombed through it, although I felt a bit wrung out by the end and not exactly up for another cheerful installment of happy funny puppy violence and genocide time just yet.

Alison, Roger and Gwyn become trapped when the discovery of a box of old plates releases and old power that is exercised through the re-enactment of a triangle of love and betrayal and murder. Tensions fracture their friendship along lines of family and class and race in the stiflingly claustrophobic confines of a Welsh valley. Garner lets dialogue do a lot of the work, but the passages describing Gwyn's attempt to climb out of the valley and escape is as intense and horrible as even the celebrated tunnel scenes from Weirdstone. Emotions are scraped raw and bitter, but it's the increasingly loathsome Roger's hidden hurt that is the key to their release in the end. A powerful, resonant classic.

For anyone who's enjoyed driving their kids to distraction with increasingly absurd and surreal tales and/or excuses but, like me, sputter out as you lead the charging elephants against the nombies, who eat chocolate biscuits and who may have been responsible for the disappearance of the chocolate biscuits that were in the press just yesterday, this shaggy dinosaur story about a trip to the shop for milk interrupted by aliens and time-travelling dinosaurs and volcano gods and wumpires and so on is just the thing. The children in the story might not be impressed, and your own kids might not be impressed with your efforts, but here's the perfect common ground of mad surreal silliness told with calm aplomb, very funny and very charming and definitely one to be read aloud.

I had to not read this for ages because I was writing a book myself and that book had anthropomorphised seasons in it and one thing I could not possibly do was read how terry Pratchett anthropomorphised seasons before I worked out how to do it myself. Now the book is done and alas and waily waily waily Pratchett has met the guy in all-caps, so I finally get to read it.

Tiffany Aching, witch-in-training, through a blunder at a dark and mysterious dance, finds that the wintersmith, the spirit of winter, has fallen in love with her, partly because he thinks she's the spirit of summer and partly just because she's Tiffany. His various and potentially catastrophic attempts at wooing, as he struggles to become more human, need to be curtailed, or there might never be a summer ever again. Tiffany is aided by assorted witches and the Wee Free Men, aggravating as it may be.

Funny and smart with heart, this is fantasy, but grounded and sensible as ever, even as it scales the heights of mad ideas. Sigh. I don't want him to be gone.

Set in a modern London with a severe ghost problem, this is the second adventure for the intrepid phantom stalkers of Lockwood & Co. Brought in at the discovery of an unexpected grave, the disinterring of the iron coffin and its grisly contents leads to disaster, and a dangerous ghost escapes and an even more dangerous artifact is lost. Even more dangerous than the supernatural entities are the living villains sniffing around - relic hunters looking for haunted objects to steal and sell. Lucy, George and Lockwood tear around London on the trail of the mysterious mirror, but there's a killer close behind.

This series is becoming a favourite. Rich in atmosphere, lots of secrets and mysteries and plenty of adventure and intrigue all built around endearing characters. Exceptionally well written, too, dark and witty, but surprisingly ordinary and cheerful in its everydayness. Of the three YA books I've just read and reviewed, this was the most fun, which is surprising when you consider how preoccupied with death a smart book about ghost hunting must necessarily be. But with no genocide and no series of brutal betrayals and compromises corrupting their souls, Lockwood & Co are definitely the people to hang out with.

Why must Scarlet become Ivy? Invited to take her departed sister's place at an exclusive boarding school, Scarlet discovers she is expected to BECOME Ivy at the behest of the terrifying Miss Fox. But this means entering a minefield, because she has no way of knowing what Ivy did the previous year, of what secrets she uncovered or what enemies she made. And it turns out she made a few. And they're really gunning for her. Following a trail of exasperating clues to find pieces of her sister's diary, it's not easy being Scarlet, but it's too dangerous to be Ivy.

A very well-written little psychological boarding-school mini-gothic. Ivy's plight is tricky and claustrophobic, the school is well-realised and the characters are great. Miss Fox in particular is spectacularly monstrous and creepy. A fast and very enjoyable read, with a wonderfully spooky ending.

Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong are the secret detectives at the Deepdean School For Girls. Their mysteries aren't exactly exciting, though, until Hazel stumbles across the body in the gym. The body vanishes, but Hazel and Daisy are on the case, digging up secrets and clues. Daisy plays Sherlock to Hazel's Watson, with Daisy's ruthless pursuit of answers restrained by Hazel's sense of the human horribleness at the heart of it all. Gently but fondly and sensibly playing with the conventions of boarding-school stories and Agatha Christie stories and making a study of a particular Holmes/Watson pairing, Stevens keeps the story focused like a laser on the mystery, playing fair, but providing surprises and satisfaction with the solutions. The characters are endearingly flawed but lively and fascinating, the setting is wonderfully evoked, providing the reader with a strong, witty start to a hopefully enduring series.

Very enjoyable and rather rollicking adventure, about a young orphan who flees a literal backwater village with a rescued and untrustworthy con-man and heads for the nearest city, only to become embroiled in a tangled net of intrigue between religious zealots and oppressive controlling guilds and dangerous radicals and loony rulers. Heroine Mosca an Aikenesque figure, reminiscent of Dido Twite in her manners, though she is well able to read, and, though good-hearted, capable of making a few selfish choices that get her into hot water. The intriguing world, a sturdy fantasy version of eighteenth century England with a fractured realm and floating coffee houses, makes for a fun setting for the escapades of Mosca and friends.

Ho boy is the US cover for this much better than the UK cover. Savvy is a wild magical ride with the Beaumont family, who are blessed on their thirteenth birthdays with the appearance of an unusual power or talent. Fish can call u storms, Rocket can do things with electricity, and Mibs is about to find out what hers will be. Just before her birthday, however, her father has an accident that sends him into a coma, and so Mibs must face her birthday without parents, but with a well-meaning Pastor's wife. The party is not a success and ends with Mibs, three siblings, and the pastor's children stowing away on a pink bible bus determined to get to the hospital. Unfortunately, the bus goes in completely the wrong direction.

It's a wild, fun and funny ride, but also an emotional one, as Mibs' impulsive actions threatens to bring disaster not just on her head and the heads of her family, but also on a few innocent bystanders just trying to help.

It's interesting that for a book with a supernatural set-up, it doesn't really have a supernatural plot, though the children's savvies wreak a certain amount of havoc as they go. I actually can't decide of this works or not. Does a book about a family of misfits and outsiders trying to get to see their father in hospital need a supernatural element at all? Does a book about a family of misfits and outsiders with special powers that set them apart need more of a supernatural element to drive the plot? When Mibs' savvy kicks in, she misinterprets it, and believes she can use it to wake her father, but she soon realises her mistake, so there's that, and the savvies make the journey fairly colourful, but I think you could remove them from the story and still have the same overall story. Nonetheless, it's well written, Mibs' is a great voice, and the pages turned fast and furious till the end.

Well, that was entertaining. A stew of secrets and mysteries with weirdness and whimsy as our hero embarks on a careful plan to do... something, only to be derailed and carried off somewhere else to do something else, involving a supposedly stolen statue, supposedly worth a lot of money. It's all lies, and everything's wrong, of course. A beautifully designed and produced book, it's darkly funny, oddly touching and a terrific read.