At the heart of the quest is an environmental message, though young readers may be nonplussed that there is no role for humans in the protection of the natural world; we are definitely the villains. People have lost their connection with earth magic and have therefore relinquished their place in the community of animals and creatures united with the spirit of the earth. They also taint those creatures with whom they come in contact. Reading is about story not messages, however, and Carmody is an enchanting storyteller who inserts sufficient danger and suspense into the brave journey of Little Fur, and the humorous antics and utterances of Gem, to keep young readers enthralled and longing for the next instalment.

Gary Crew’s Sam Silverthorne is a seventeen-year-old budding ornithologist who is tempted by adventure. Crew must have had fun writing Sam Silverthorne Victory (Hachette Children’s Books Australia, $16.99 pb, 191 pp), with its pompous, pretentious central character. It is a boy’s own adventure, as Crew alludes to directly in the book, with a twenty-first century sensibility. The apparent captain of a merchant ship is, in fact, commander-in-chief of the Naval Division of Her Majesty’s Special Branch of Scotland Yard, Captain Marryat himself. However, as befits a twenty-first century version, there are intrepid women – a ‘bluestocking’, Mrs Edgeworth-Brown, and her desirable daughter, Alice, and Tian Tan/Phoebe, a Chinese/British girl. To accompany its depiction of women, the novel has a decidedly critical view of British imperialism.

Events occur at a furious pace, peopled by cheerful stereotypes where necessary. Crew evokes a world that was much more fun before global travel; when places like Mauritius were heady mixtures of unsavoury characters, perilous narrow alleys and intriguing ramshackle buildings rather than resorts for the well-heeled – in fiction, if not in reality.

This Victorian melodrama opens with a sinister death at the dinner table, the corpse being the eminent yet badly mannered Admiral Burlington of Her Majesty’s Navy, after he quaffs a plate of oysters delivered to him by Rupert Ramsam, ‘a caramelised version of Uriah Heap’. His euphoric death sets Sam Alice and friends Lucas and Phoebe on the quest to track the source of the toxic poison in an adventure of secret agents, deceptive appearances and exotic locales.

On a more serious note, Leo Zifkak and Mimi Langlander (second cousins) are precipitated into a parallel world in Emily Rodda’s The Key to Rondo (Omnibus, $29.99 hb, 370 pp). This world is depicted on a family heirloom left to Leo by Aunt Bethany; it is a music box painted in extraordinary detail. When Leo and Mimi disobey strict instructions for its use, the sorceress, the Blue Queen, emerges and snatches Mimi’s beloved dog, Mutt. In Rondo, it becomes apparent that the Blue Queen is seeking the children for sinister ends, and it is not always clear to them whom they should trust. Intrigue mounts as they realise that the Langlander family has mythical status in Rondo, but that not all Langlanders have worked for the good of Rondo. The children are reluctant partners in adventure, not liking each other very much, which provides for some tension in the novel. While Mimi searches for Mutt, Leo begins to put the pieces together of the role of his forebears, and his mission becomes the righting of wrongs.

There is much to enjoy in identifying the intertextual references to fairy-tale and nursery rhymes that Rodda has built into moments in the story. For instance, Polly, who does put the kettle on, has a sister Suki, who, with other members of her family, have been turned into swans, and a grandmother, who had a nasty encounter with a wolf. Foxes are the only successful predators against the mischievous ‘dots’, small gingerbread creatures that plague the town and countryside. The Blue Queen puts in mind Lewis’s White Queen, and Mutt, Mimi’s dog, Dorothy’s Toto.

Rodda foreshadows possible consequences from the opening sentence: ‘The day that Leo Zifkak became the owner of the music box, his life changed forever.’ The Key to Rondo rewards those who read to the end for the clever unravelling of cause and effect. Clues are carefully embedded, and fans of the Rowan of Rin and Deltora Quest series will delight in this intricately plotted story. Despite its tight construction, however, the story takes too long to get to its elegant ending, and I wonder how many of those readers who are not Rodda fans will persist.

For adolescent readers, Juliet Marillier’s Cybele’s Secret (Pan Macmillan, $16.95 pb, 410 pp) is centred on seventeen-year-old Paula, away from her home in Transylvania, travelling as assistant to her merchant father. They go to Istanbul in search of a highly desired religious artefact, Cybele’s Gift, believed to be the focus of a revival of an ancient, female religion, which they are contracted to purchase for a client. The Mufti of Istanbul, though tolerant of Christians and Jews, is suspicious of Cybele’s followers, which heightens the tension. Paula is quite the young heroine, a scholar fluent in Greek, Latin and French, as well as her mother tongue.

This novel has enough quest, adventure, riddles, frustrated love and ambiguous characters – including the urbane and the sophisticated Greek, Irene of Volos, and the ‘dangerous and irresistible’ Duarte da Costa Aguiar – to keep fantasy fans involved; the same fans, presumably, who are not bothered by an illiterate bodyguard, Stoyan, whose everyday conversations are sprinkled with words such as ‘erudite’ and ‘capricious’. Marillier writes in a rather prolix style, and the reader should keep a good watch on lips, eyes and eyebrows: ‘the pirate’s lips curved into an insouciant smile’, ‘his dark brows shot up in disdain’, ‘his eyes were dancing with pleasure’.

Despite this, Paula is an appealing young heroine, ripe for love, and Marillier tells an engrossing adventure in evocatively drawn locations. The quest resolves well for all the central characters, and the strong women, dashing heroes and deft romance will delight the adolescent girls at whom the book is aimed. It links with the author’s previous story about the Transylvanian family, Wildwood Dancing (2006), though the Other Kingdom impinges less on Cybele’s Secret.

What these fantasies have in common – and all would have been written well before the change in government in Australia – is a message of tolerance, acceptance of difference and diversity, and a celebration of variety and variance. That is not a bad thing to take forward from a reading experience.