Boys are back in books - make way for the new kids on the block. At the end of this millennium, boys have zoomed in between the covers in a big way as heroes, warriors, victims and in gangs and teams or just playing solo. And in a fast-changing modern world they are shown coping with everything from joy to insecurity: heartaches and nightmares. Football books to start with: In MacB, Football can be Deadly by Neil Arksey (Puffin, £3.99 in UK ) Banksie and MacB have spent all summer practising to get onto the football team. But then the star striker has a terrible accident. And Banksie must face his friend's betrayal. A dramatic story of over-the-top ambition in competitive sport, written in easy-to-read format of short chapters and big type. More light-hearted is Peter Regan's Riverside Loot (The Children's Press, £3.50). Football isn't everything, the team tells Chippy, their star player who is facing suspension. But he's unconvinced. "It's more than chasin' a ball", Chippy says. "It's eleven lads chasin' a dream."
A book from Mentor gives realistic insights into other boyhood dreams of stardom. In Luke in the Movies by Arthur Flynn (Mentor, £4.99) scruffy Luke endures elocution lessons, works on a movie set and finally meets Budd, the child star.
There is smart toffee in Revenge of the Toffee Monster by Susan Gates (Puffin, £3.99 in UK), in which Lenny stumbles into the old Toffee Museum and finds out its terrible secret - a Toffee Monster frozen for over a hundred years. Inventive and humorous sci-fi tale.
In Dick King-Smith's classic, The Witch of Blackberry Bottom (Viking, £.10.99 in UK), set in a rural idyll, Patsy and Jim befriend a strange and rather dirty old lady who cares for six dogs, a donkey and other assorted animals. But some people say she's a witch. For the newly fluent reader: In Beyond the Red Belly by Margot Bosonnet (Wolfhound, £4.99), unruly Mackey and gang battle to save their Conker Woods from the property developers. Exuberant, it emphasises the fun of childhood before the onset of teenage precocity.
Childhood resilience is also to the fore in the appealing Paddle Feet ( Red Fox, £3.99 in UK) by Christine Purkis. Tash and her friends try to rescue the Waterfolk who live beyond the waterfall.
`Families are also step-families struggling with jealousy and sadness and evil diseases. Step-families suck". So do other slurpy slobbery things in the weird thriller Totally Wicked by Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzman (Puffin, £4.99 in UK).
But families can be fun, too: in a lighter vein, Round the Bend by Jim Halligan and John Newman (Wolfhound Press, £3.99) is an irresistibly wacky account of a bank robbery foiled by a family who also save their father's business.
Homeless and alone, Link is living rough in London in Stone Cold ( Puffin, £4.99 in UK). "No one gives a damn", he says. Certainly not his mum's boyfriend. He survives because streetwise Ginger befriends him. Then Ginger suddenly disappears. Robert Swindell won the Carnegie Medal for this poignant and fascinating tale of street life seen through the alternate eyes of the young boy and a serial killer.
Faraway Home (O'Brien, £4.99) is an absorbing new book from Marilyn Taylor. Karl and his sister Rosa escape Nazi Germany and are placed in a Jewish refugee farm in the North of Ireland. A remarkable blend of fiction and historical fact, which also reveals a relatively unknown facet of World War Two. In Run for Cover - The story of the gene machine (Wolfhound, £7.99 ) Hop-along, the lame fox, sees a land populated by impossible animals. This sixth quest book in Tom McCaughren's Run-Wild series, is a cautionary tale for the new millennium. Under the fox-fur is man's fear of the abuse of power of modern technology. Cautionary, too, is Out of Nowhere (O'Brien Press, £4.99). Stephen wakes up in a nightmarish place without memory of who he is. In this taut science-fiction thriller, Gerard Whelan has created an imaginatively eerie new world.
Pauline Devine's latest novel for children, Best Friends Again, has just been published by The Children's Press