There are long, long passages where nothing much happens: endless speculations about whether Odysseus will ever come back, strangely inconsequential visits of the gods, interminable conversations where the characters tell each other things the reader already knows. It’s written in the drearily elevated diction often thought suitable for historical novels: months are “moons”, a lot is “many”, crying is “weeping”, everybody is “all” and so on I found something to irritate me on every page. Readers interested in ancient Greece would do better to try the Odyssey itself.With relief I turn to Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness (Oxford £12.99). Put it in the Christmas stocking of the teenage girl in your life – or a teenage boy who is in touch with his feminine side And it’s the first book of a trilogy. Hooray!Like Helen Dunmore, Ad? Geras has also written for adults.

And, like Melvin Burgess, she has chosen to re-tell a traditional legend – in her case, the Odyssey, told from the point of view of the stay-at-homes. Thus Sapphire and her brother are drawn into the intoxicating, but dangerous world of Ingo, the realm of the Mer; and there are hints that they may learn more about their father’s disappearance. There’s also a first-rate character in Granny Carne, an enigmatic witch whose Earth magic is a kind of counterpoise to the sea-magic of Ingo. It’s all wildly implausible, but so gracefully written that one suspends disbelief not just willingly but eagerly. Sapphire and her older brother, Conor, live in Cornwall with their mother; their father disappeared in mysterious circumstances some time ago.

There’s more mystery when Sapphire sees her brother talking to a strange, long-haired girl on the rocks in the cove. One day, when Sapphire follows her brother down to the cove for a swim, she meets an extremely surprising character: Faro, a merperson, for want of a better word. Ingo (Harper Collins £12.99) has masses of girl-appeal – and clearly I have an inner girl, for it appealed to me. The story is set in Newcastle in the 1960s in a working-class Roman Catholic community Davie befriends Steven Rose, a new kid in town. He’s a strange boy with waxy skin, haunting eyes, a talent for making clay models and an original, not to say sinister, cast of mind. Halfway through, the story takes a supernatural turn – unexpected, but the atmosphere has been so well established that it’s wholly believable when it occurs. This is a weird, haunting novel for teenagers, the kind of novel Graham Greene might have produced if he’d written for this age-group.Helen Dunmore is another of the growing band of adult authors who write for children, and she does it very well indeed.

Here are a few nouns from page 44 to give you the flavour: monster, claw, blood, sword, skin, guts, insides, wound, intestines, blood, bile. I was slightly hindered in my enjoyment by not caring very much about any of the characters, but teenage boys with strong stomachs should enjoy it.David Almond’s Clay (Hodder, £10.99) is a subtler, more literary production. The tone is set on page one, where the main character, Davie, dislodges a bit of communion wafer that’s stuck to his teeth and then takes a drag on his cigarette. It’s a re-telling of the Norse Volsunga saga, set in a post-apocalyptic Britain of the future, and chronicles the monster-slaying exploits of young Sigurd It’s a dirty, messy, sticky read. All the same, there’s a repetiveness about the narration, a stressing of points that the reader already knows, which becomes irritating after a while.

And thrillers need more tension than this one provides – you never feel that Noah is in serious danger.
If it’s tension you want, another Doubleday author, Andy McNab, is your man. He too is better-known as a writer of adult thrillers, and Payback (£10.99), written with the help of Robert Rigby, is his second novel for teens. The style seldom rises above the competent, but it doesn’t need to for this genre of book – it works entirely on gripping plot and authenticity. Fergus Watts, an ex-SAS soldier, and his grandson Danny Watts, aged 17, are on the run from MI5 who, for reasons that are never entirely clear, are determined to rub them out.