I’m certainly not comfortable recommending this for junior primary school readers, but maybe I’m out of touch. The author, David Caddy, is, after all, a teacher. I haven’t read his previous novels, but their titles – Whammy!, Smash and Wacko! – suggest a degree of zaniness, or at least light-heartedness, that is entirely missing from The Reef, a story (mostly) grounded in realism. The setting, a small Western Australian crayfishing town, is well evoked, with its limestone cliffs and sand dunes, local store, unlocked houses, marauding magpies and lizards.

Tom is a sympathetically flawed hero, an asthmatic reliant on his puffer, who stands up for classmate Ellie in the face of teasing, and who shows incredible bravery in pursuing the two villains suspected of causing her father’s death at sea and stealing the treasure he had recovered from the reef. A huge suspension of disbelief is called for as Tom creeps around late at night, eavesdropping on the thugs who have previously terrorised him. For pure cliché, however, it’s hard to go past the schlock-horror of the Brian de Palma-type ending. What were Caddy and his publisher thinking?

It’s also unclear what Susan Geason had in mind with Death of a Princess (Little Hare, $14.95 pb, 122 pp). Presumably an historical mystery that would also educate children about the facts of daily life in the harem of Mer-Wer at the time of Ramses II – or such facts as might be appropriate for young readers. Sexual tensions and jealousies are hinted at rather than explored, even though they lie behind the sudden death of Princess Isis. Foul play is suspected and high on the list – although not supported by common sense, motive or evidence – is fourteen-year-old Meryet-Neith, beautician by royal appointment, one of the few in the harem to show the young princess any kindness. In order to save herself, Meryet-Neith sets out to discover the truth. As it turns out, ‘truth’ is quite the wrong word. In a novel based heavily on historical facts about Hittites, mummification, harem life, the practice of medicine, aromatherapy and beauty routines of the period – and Geason lists her sources at the end – the poison used to dispatch the princess turns out to be pure invention on the part of the author. Further, Geason confesses that there is no evidence that poison was ever used as a murder weapon in ancient Egypt. Would Geason take such liberties in her adult crime novels, I wonder?

Apart from that, the story poses particular problems for young readers. The opening chapter introduces sixteen named characters, none of them, with the possible exception of Meryet, especially interesting or memorable, and Geason favours telling rather than showing; the narrative is light on dialogue, with virtually none in the opening six pages, none at all in the twelve pages of dénouement, and large chunks of descriptive prose throughout. Still, I rather enjoyed the details of Meryet’s job. The way she flits around the harem with her ‘make-up kit’ of ‘high quality products’, giving samples and beauty demonstrations to the pharaoh’s wives and concubines, put me in mind of a busy Avon lady.

There’s a fanciful cat in Geason’s novel and one based on a real-life model in Mary Small’s Catastrophe Cat (Cygnet Books, $14.95 pb, 73 pp). Tia, a small Siamese, is lost amid the mayhem and aftermath of Cyclone Tracy. The Gillespie family, including Tia’s grieving owner Leisa, are evacuated from Darwin to Melbourne. (Interestingly, in light of the controversy over what to call those similarly evacuated after Hurricane Katrina, the people here are referred to as ‘refugees’.) They return six months later, Leisa having reluctantly come to accept that her beloved pet is lost forever. The reader, however, knows something that Leisa does not: the cat has been rescued from near-death by Dave, one of the crew on the HMAS Brisbane, who finds it while on clean-up operations in the devastated city. The animal is subsequently adopted by an old man who just happens to live close to the Gillespie home, or what’s left of it, so the scene is set for a big surprise when the family returns to Darwin.

Initially, I wasn’t sure that Small should have revealed so early in the story that the cat had survived the cyclone. In reality, the family never discovered what had happened to Tia during the six months that she was lost, so Small’s version of events is invented. But if she hadn’t fictionalised this part of the story, it would have had a rather flat middle section and no satisfactory explanation for the reader when Tia, now turned feral, is spotted in her familiar haunts by Leisa’s brothers. In any case, young readers rather enjoy knowing things the characters in the story do not, and the reunion at the end is suitably affecting.

The description of the cyclone as the family huddle in their bathroom is genuinely exciting and alarming, and ‘the total chaos that was their city’, including the problem of hundreds of lost and abandoned pets, will be a timely reminder that disasters on this scale don’t always happen overseas. Black-and-white illustrations throughout are by Chantal Stewart, including the rather scary cover picture. I’m not sure that such nightmarish realism would have been my choice.

The Legend of Big Red (UQP, $16.95 pb, 93 pp) is a light-hearted fishing tale of the one-that-got-away variety, not strikingly original, but it will probably satisfy all but the most ruthless and single-minded of young anglers. Liam and Barney set off on a weekend camping trip to Bailey’s Swamp, eager to catch Big Red, the local version of the Loch Ness monster: an enormous orange cod rumoured to have survived in its depths. Liam does in fact manage to hook it, ‘a brave old fish, a fish I’d fought for the last couple of hours’, but then … well, you know the rest. James Roy’s literate text is enlivened with some lively banter and goofy goings-on involving two hunters, a dog and mistaken identity – and comic illustrations by Rae Dale.