The best children's chapter books for the summer

The Hallett format translates well: a story told via old newspaper clippings, diary entries and text and email messages sent between siblings whose parents are separated. Ava and Luke are working their way through a mysterious box of summer camp diaries and ephemera they have found in their dad’s attic, juggling suspect motivations as they try to solve a cold case from 1983.

The premise will appeal to amateur sleuths and readers who pale at vast expanses of unbroken text alike. It’s very Scooby-Doo via the Chilterns: ghost stories, property developers, missing knives and red herrings are combined with a cast of young campers enjoying the outdoors as much as they can, given the police keep turning up.

Publisher Barrington Stoke makes a point of serving not-so-keen readers with sharp plots and friendly fonts. The Elixir by Lindsay Galvin mixes historical fact with a swirl of the supernatural, while Kristina Kister’s vivid illustrations combine modern graphic styles with costume drama.

The year is 1655, and a young Isaac Newton is boarding above an apothecary’s shop. Galvin runs with what might have happened if Isaac swapped knowledge with the apothecary’s children. Young Ann’s tinctures are particularly beneficial, but her gifts are in danger of drawing the wrong kind of attention at a time of plague and witch hunts. Together, the pair create an elixir whose potent powers are tested all too soon.

Diaries have been big in this age group since 2007, when Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid put pen to paper. The latest is by the excellent Ross Welford of Time Travelling With a Hamster fame.

The Unlikely Diary of Prince Kal the Alien (HarperCollins) isn’t really a diary, more a multi-font account of a grumpy pint-size space royal who mistakenly lands on Earth having hotwired an interdimensional portrait, the “Anywhere Cabinet”, belonging to the court sorcerer. When Kal fails to persuade Northumberland’s Department of Family and Youth Services to take him to their leader, he ends up in foster care; amusing misunderstandings abound. Kal’s mission to return home involves generating sufficient good vibes from a community wild swimming event in Bundle Bay to power up his Anywhere Crystal. Great fun.

Over the Pennines to Liverpool, where shy, ant-loving Nate Yu is coping badly with leaving his small town and starting a new school in Nate Yu’s Blast from the Past (Piccadilly Press), by the award-winning Maisie Chan. Nate’s two mums are keen for him to immerse himself in Liverpool’s Chinese community, but Nate – adopted by white British people – is not sure. All that changes when he researches a historical artefact and it conjures up a ghost from the first world war – a member of the Chinese Labour Corps. Chan’s book wears its learning lightly as Nate tries to reunite an engraved shell case with its rightful owner, coming to terms with heritage and family as he goes.

We’ve had umpteen new takes on the school genre – training dragons, taming unicorns; you name it, there’s a selective school a bit like Hogwarts for it. Debut kids’ author Peter Burns is, however, a welcome new boy, retracing the footsteps of Artemis Fowl, Alex Rider et al.

Burns’s Shadow Thieves (Farshore) is a rip-snorting series opener that finds orphan Tom recruited into an elite academy tasked with keeping world order. Britain is an obscure backwater in this counterfactual tale; France, Prussia and Japan boss the globe. Dominated by aristocratic families, Beaufort’s School for Deceptive Arts needs new blood – and the street smarts of an urchin who has narrowly escaped the workhouse only to find himself embroiled in a deadly intrigue. Top marks.

Kid spies are crowdpleasers. Books about pebbles? Less so. But in the hands of “little” Alex Horne of Taskmaster fame, unprepossessing minerals sing. TV comedians muscling in on middle years are becoming tiresome, but Horne is in the narrow subset who earn a pass thanks to his quirky heart.

In The Last Pebble (Walker), Trader and his grandfather are dedicated beachcombers. But when Trader discovers a particularly lustrous pebble he begins to witness change – both welcome and unwelcome. Why is his grandad acting so strangely? Are Trader’s new friends trustworthy? Does the pebble have… powers? This is a small but perfectly formed seaside yarn in which an awkward boy discovers his grandfather’s unexpected past.

Order any of these titles from observershop.co.uk. Delivery charges may apply