Children’s books

LITTLE FISH (Caterpillar Books; €7.55) is a tactile board book, which follows a small fish on his journey under the sea.

On his way he meets scratchy starfish, lumpy seaweed, shiny shells and other friendly sea creatures. But when he comes up against the glittering teeth of a shark he must think fast! The strong, textured illustrations by Kate Saunders are delightfully geared to age two to four.

For the same age group Ten Shiny Snails by Ruth Galloway (Little Tiger Press; €11.58) is a clever counting book that doesn’t smack of “learning”. Ten shiny 3D snails are embedded in different depths of holes on each page. Each time the child turns a page a snail will disappear to have fun elsewhere, until there is just one snail left. All come together again in a final pop-up. Imaginative and fun.

Benedict Blathwayt, whose Little Red Train series has entertained youngsters for years, has now switched to dinosaurs with much the same detailed minutiae. In Dinosaur Disaster (Red Fox; €7.55) young dinosaur Fin is chased by large bullies. Where can he hide?

Paleontology is perhaps not quite as captivating as the Little Red Train, but it’s engaging fun for a new generation of four to six-year-olds.

The first chapter of Dark Angels by Katherine Langrish (HarperCollins; €8.80) is a chilling foretaste of events to come. Alone on the boggy Welsh land near Devil’s Ridge, teenager Wolf looks down on the Abbey where he’d been left as a small child. Stories of ghosts and elves fill him with fear, especially when he sees an elf-like creature disappear into the undergrowth. . He rescues the creature, but is found by the hunting party and taken, along with the elf child, to the castle of Sir Hugo. Celtic otherworldliness, human frailty and undercurrents of evil blend together in the bleak winter landscape to create a powerful story that will be remembered long after closing the book.