The Runaways

Winner of the Guardian Children's Fiction Award this year and a nicely fat book for this age range. The story is a simple one but it's handled very well, very skillfully and very satisfyingly. The portrayal of Julia and Nathan as friendless isolates in their school is deft and the discovery of money is both good adventure stuff as well as the means by which the two are brought together, at first in mutual distrust, and then gradually in a gently created relationship. The mix of solid adventure -- the discovery of the money, running away, a series of dramatic escapades, such an amount of money -- and the creation of the relationship makes the book special. Read it aloud, its series of dramatic episodes makes it ideal (it could make a good class set for first-years) and put in into book boxes.