Under 5s
Reading habits can be made in the summer holidays, when children have leisure to read, and adults time to read aloud, which is the best way to encourage a love of books. The following is an assortment of portable paperbacks, fat volumes to curl up with, and beautiful books for summer presents. Enjoy the giggles and gorillas.

A gentle, touching story, Charlie Is My Darling (Orchard £10.99), for 3-5s, is about a boy who walks an old lady's terrier and makes friends with them both. Malachy Doyle's text has a lilting rhythm, and Stephen Lambert's pencil and pastel pictures a summery charm, lovely colours and plenty of incident, with scenes of the park, street and hillside, and expressive episodes of a chase.

It seems to be the season for gorillas. Ed Vere has a knack for making stories that appeal to the very young also interesting for the adults who read them aloud. Mr Big (Puffin £5.99) is a lonely gorilla whose size frightens everyone until they hear his piano-playing and he becomes a jazz sensation. Vere uses bold colour and simple cartoons with a suitably fat line to create bluesy atmosphere, evocative settings and a touching character. It's cool.

In Little Beauty (Walker £10.99), for 3-6s, about a friendship between a gorilla and the cute kitten of the title, Anthony Browne's latest ape is mostly in polished miniaturist detail - with every hair drawn - but one splendid spread uses a loose pencil outline; it's good to have a picturebook that makes you think about how it is made.

Andy Ellis's When Lulu Went to the Zoo (Andersen Press £10.99) is the rhyming story of a crusading four-year-old who climbs into cages at the zoo and sets the animals free. A delightful wish-fulfilment fantasy with a message about how captivity makes “the life go out of the llamas' ears”, and spiky, eventful, exuberant cartoons in ink and pretty watercolours.

Story collections are useful for travel, because they last lots of bedtimes. The Daddy Goose Collection (The Chicken House £6.99), by Vivian French, invents a back story to 12 well-known nursery rhymes, with noises, repetition and rhythm, to nurture 3-5s' sense of language and of fun. Four illustrators are variously cosy and (notably AnnaLaura Cantone) quirky.

Jeanne Willis's The Bog Baby (Puffin £5.99) evokes childhood pond-dipping as two sisters find a little blue creature in Gwen Millward's Bluebell Wood, and make a pet of him, until it is clear that he will thrive only in the wild. This tale about mothers and daughters, imagination and secrets, love and letting go, works like a poem, making something resonant out of a remembered event.

Eliot Jones: Midnight Superhero by Anne Cottringer (Scholastic £5.99), for 4-6s, has unusual wit and liveliness. Eliot is a quiet little boy by day, but when the clock strikes midnight he becomes an expert lion tamer, champion swimmer, sleuth, skilled jet pilot, experienced mountaineer... When he saves the world “the earth trembles with deafening applause”. Alex T Smith's illustrations make the pages a richly patterned, comic, action-packed mix of cartoon and collage. Huge fun.

5- to 8-year-olds
A notable new illustrator, Hannah Shaw, fills the pages with event, as skewed perspectives, comic details and playful use of typefaces tell the story of sly-faced Evil Weasel (Cape £10.99), who is very rich and shows off too much to have friends but reforms when nobody comes to his party. For 4-7s - and adults, who can enjoy the entertaining endpapers.

The whole family could go on holiday this summer with Ian Fleming spin-offs: adults with Sebastian Faulks, youngsters (11+) with Charlie Higson's young Bond (the latest is the Mexican adventure Hurricane Gold, Puffin £6.99) or Anthony Horowitz's books about teenage superspy Alex Rider or, for 7-11s, female spy Jane Blonde's popular adventures (by Jill Marshall). But best of all is an actual Ian Fleming written for 7-10s: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Puffin £14.99), reissued with John Burningham's stylish 1964 illustrations, using mixed media, dumpy figures and a free, inky line. It reminds us that the Pott children (not Potts) had a mother and there was no Truly Scrumptious, and that the car had green wings.

The summer is a good time to turn emerging readers into confident ones. First readers for 3-6s can be dull: not so Mo Willems's Elephant & Piggie books (Walker £4.99 each), which, despite only having half a dozen words per page, have narrative, punch lines and a sense of fun.

If you have enjoyed Francesca Simon's Horrid Henry, Hilary McKay's Charlie books are a must. Hilarious about friendship and school, they feature naughty boys who are best friends. The fifth and sixth books (Scholastic £3.99, illustrated by Sam Hearn) are Charlie and the Cheese andOnion Crisps, about “ponky” breath and first love, and Charlie and the Haunted Tent, in which Charlie has a chance to prove himself braver than his big brother.

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