https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/24/childrens-books-roundup-the-best-new-picture-books-and-novels

A Dickensian orphanage, a rip-roaring secret agent caper, hunting for monsters and the best new YA novels

Homeschool may be out for the summer, but there’s new reading aplenty. For nine-plus, Victoria Jamieson, award-winning author-illustrator of Roller Girl, teams up with Omar Mohammed to tell his story in the powerful graphic novel When Stars Are Scattered (Faber). Omar and his disabled brother Hassan grew up in the Kenyan refugee camp Dadaab before being resettled in the US: young readers are plunged into the hunger, boredom and desperation of children growing up in limbo, as well as the hope that enables them to survive.

Sophie Kirtley’s debut The Wild Way Home (Bloomsbury) echoes Skellig and Stig of the Dump, with a bold, readable charm entirely its own. Charlie longs to be a big brother, but when his baby sibling is born with a heart defect, he runs away into the forest, where he finds the strange, fierce Harby, a Stone Age boy, floating in the river. Will Charlie and Harby ever break free of the wood? Full of peril, sadness and wild joy, it’s a timeslip adventure with a difference.