Fantasy, time travel, sci-fi, adventure, and Parallel Worlds, summed up by a literary historian as “counter factual time-line fantasies,”1 recur in this year’s pile, with a little whimsy added (Attica, a Rider Haggard-like adventure in an attic). There are two retellings of Greek mythology (Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels, the best fiction I’ve read for a long time), one of the Arthurian legend (Rick Yancy, O such a falling off after Riordan), a Faust story (Matthew Skelton), and a James Bond (Anthony Horowitz). These retellings of myths and legends are distinguished from the Parallel Worlds tales in being adaptations of specific myths and legends. A boy—it’s a boy in each one—encounters mythical figures via magic. Except for the Australian Isobelle Carmody, all the books are from Britain. Historical or quasi-historical fiction has been on the rise since 1970, but the recent increase in such fiction for children is new and, Suzanne Keen believes, directly proportional to the de-emphasizing of history from the British school curriculum. The 1980s were the innovative phase for the old genre of historical novels, when post-modern uncertainties were emphasized in experimental styles and mixed genres, telling stories about the past “that point to multiple truths or the overturning of old received Truth [and adopting] a parodic or playful attitude to history over an ostensibly normative mimesis.”2   A new genre in recent children’s fiction is books about books. In Endymion Spring and The Death Collector, books are the source of power and the focus of conspiracies. Endymion Spring is even set in the library of an Oxford college. A lovely passage in it echoes of Borges’s The Library of Babel:3 The pages [of the magic diary] were no longer blank, but covered in minute panels of words that opened like invisible doors the moment his eyes fell on them, leading him into different stories, different languages . . .each a stairwell of paper taking him on a new adventure. Every now and then they froze, stopping in mid-sentence, on the verge of revealing an amazing truth, and he leaped to a new entry.   Going by these voluminous volumes, series are trendy. We have No.2. of Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap trilogy, Nos. 1-2 of Isobelle Carmody’s Gateway trilogy, and 2 and 9 of the Darren Shan lot about a good vampire with divided loyalties, both ending with “To be continued” and that straggle ...