Dragging a reluctant child on holiday? Bring these books along

, The Sunday Times

A surprising number of children’s books about summer begin with reluctance to go wherever the summer is to be spent. Little-known relatives, newly blended families and resisted summer camps feature heavily. And yet summer still casts its spell in so many cases, and there is a good deal of falling in love with new places and communities, long sunny days, jolly larks, and the magic of the outdoors. For anyone taking recalcitrant children on summer adventures, here are some hopeful books that capture good times and prolong them in a shimmering heat haze.

For the very young, and in the run-up to a new collaboration by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury (Oh Dear, Look What I Got!, out in September), the picture book that most encapsulates the breezy outdoorsiness of summer holidays is We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Walker £7.99, age 2-4), a bestseller since 1993. The story revolves around four siblings making their way through the long grass and mud of a Suffolk landscape. Oxenbury’s vision makes that exciting even before the bear appears.

An old favourite from 2000 that conjures up the seaside, with dreamlike additions, is The Visitors Who Came to Stay by Annalena McAfee and Anthony Browne (Walker, 4-7). It’s out of print but easily available second-hand. This picture book is about Katy, who lives contentedly with her dad until his girlfriend and her son move in. The special alchemy of this book, besides the happy ending, lies in its surreal shape substitutions, which bring together distinct elements of holiday joy — fairgrounds, ice cream and the beach — all rendered in colours as intense as summer light.

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Also about a blended family is Julia Moscardo’s Changing Tides (Little Tiger £12.99, 3-6), in which little Lula gradually warms to her new big brother and stepmother. Dappled light, sand dunes, foaming waves, shells, sandcastles, a summer storm and a cosy caravan combine to create a setting that’s highly evocative of the season.

The author-illustrator Jeff Kinney sustains the originality and comedy of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series in its 19th instalment, with the British Book Award-winner Hot Mess (Puffin £14.99, 7-11). The book finds hilarity and chaos in Greg Heffley’s beach house family gathering, with stress that will feel universally familiar — and inevitably daft things happen. Perfect for anyone who doesn’t want summer reading to feel like a chore.

In CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it is always winter, never Christmas. But in the fifth chronicle, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (various publishers, ages 8+), Edmund and Lucy are struggling in the summer — “It was dreadful having to spend the summer holidays at their Aunt’s.” But then seawater splashes out of the frame of a picture of a Narnian ship. The pair are transported (with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb) on board the Dawn Treader alongside the boy king Caspian and Reepicheep, the swashbuckling mouse. On a quest to the world’s end, they visit islands where they end slavery, close down nightmares, engage in battle and witness Eustace’s transformation from a dragon — saved by Aslan — into a nicer person. Not your average summer experiences, but the book is full of the smell of the sea and the light of sunsets.

Illustration of book cover for Saffy's Angel by Hilary McKay.

Saffy’s Angel by Hilary McKay (Hodder Children’s Books £6.99, 8-11), is the first in the series about the unmissable and hilariously quirky Casson family, and follows a secret trip to Italy for the adopted heroine to find something from her past. It is somewhere she dreams of from the beginning: “In the dream was a white paved place with walls. A sunny place, quiet and enclosed. There were little dark pointed trees and there was the sound of water. The blue sky was too bright to look at …. In the dream was the word, Siena.” This place will lodge in your memory just as it does in Saffy’s.

First published in 1965, Over Sea, Under Stone (Puffin £7.99, 9-12) is the first book of what went on to become Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, continued ten years later. In it, the three Drew siblings, staying with their great-uncle Merry in Cornwall, must overcome the forces of Dark. It merges Arthurian legend with a perilous treasure hunt for the Grail, with fishing trips and the local landscape woven in. An ideal way into the fantasy genre for children aged eight and above, it also bathes the southwest in an ancient, and sometimes sinister, magic.

For older teenagers or young adults, Meg Rosoff’s funny, wise and observant The Great Godden (Bloomsbury £7.99, 14+) evokes the feeling of being on holiday so vividly it almost puts sand between your toes. It is also an antidote to the clichés of a holiday romance: when a charismatic boy joins a family in their beach house, his manipulative behaviour reveals the dangers of infatuation.

Illustration of various animals surrounding the title "My Family & Other Animals".

Finally, the pink villa in Corfu where the eccentric Durrell family stay in Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical My Family and Other Animals (Penguin £9.99, 9+) is perhaps the most entrancing foreign abode imaginable — and unsurprisingly helped to boost local tourism. This book stirs a deep wanderlust, perfectly captured in its distillation of summer’s enchantment: “Each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us as glossy and colourful as a child’s transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.” It is, of course, also irresistible because it is so funny.

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