The Year My Life Broke is a topical story about how people can put their lives back together after disruption. Josh’s life is seriously affected when his parents’ company fails, and they downsize to live in his grandfather’s ramshackle old house in Tarrawagga (‘If you’ve ever had a piece of chewy in your mouth for a week and a half, you’ve got the taste of Tarrawagga’). How could you not be amused by a narrator like Josh? When he laughed ‘like a cracked kookaburra’, I was hooked.

Getting the voice right is no easy thing when writing for the young; it is where so many first-person novels lose credibility. I believed in Josh every step of the way: Marsden unpicks his tangled resentments and emotions as Josh enters his new school and tries to find a new identity for himself. At home, the only thing of interest is the house next door, with its curtained windows and air of abandonment; Josh is convinced he has seen ‘one jigsaw piece from a face’ at a side window. As Josh’s sporting star gradually begins to rise in the final chapters, so does the excitement level on the ‘most boring street in the most boring town in Australia’. The story’s cricket element was a bonus, though not all readers will find it as absorbing as I did (the concluding match goes on for thirty-two pages).

Can the same be said of The 39-Storey Treehouse (Pan Macmillan, $12.99 pb, 345 pp, 9781742612379), the third in the Treehouse series written by Andy Griffiths and illustrated in comic style by Terry Denton? These thirteen new tales defy logic and gravity, and text and drawings erupt from the page with manic energy and rude humour, but is there anything particularly Australian about them? Probably not, despite the presence of the Sydney Opera House and of a ‘merry-go-round’, rather than a carousel, in their wondrous tree house. Does it matter? The conceit is that in order to meet a publishing deadline, Terry has invented a machine which will rapidly generate the new stories, but chaos descends when the machine develops a will of its own. It has analysed the creators’ previous books and decided that ‘not only do they fail to convey a useful moral or uplifting message, but they are sloppily written, poorly drawn and the characters are neither believable nor intelligent’. Andy and Terry, suitably outraged, bring in Professor Stupido to un-invent the dastardly machine, but he, like the machine, develops delusions of grandeur and ... But why am I bothering with the plot? The two boys in my family, aged five and eight, both adored this book and laughed hysterically at the repetitions, the inventive puns and jokes, and all the ‘BLOOF!’s, ‘BLOORT!’s and ‘BLAP!’s that adorn the pages.

From the ridiculous to the sublime: one of the best novels I’ve read since John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012) is Penny Tangey’s Stay Well Soon (University of Queensland Press, $14.95 pb, 240 pp, 9780702249945). Written for a middle-primary reader rather than a Young Adult one, it delicately straddles the line between tragedy and comedy while never quite descending into the former, despite dealing with childhood cancer. The subtle humour of the book comes chiefly from the young heroine’s distinctive voice, at once naïve and wise, and informed by the utterances of the adults around her. Like Marsden’s Josh, Stevie is an eleven-year-old narrator you can completely believe in; she speaks and writes as someone her age would, and Tangey almost never hits a wrong note. Stevie lives with her struggling single mother and misses her father. She dreams and draws horses, suspects her mysteriously sick brother Rhys might be faking it, and negotiates the changing hierarchies of the playground with admirable sangfroid.

When Rhys is hospitalised, Stevie reluctantly accompanies her mother on daily visits and meets fourteen-year-old Lara, another horse-lover. Lara is terminally ill. Then Rhys is diagnosed with leukaemia, and suddenly Stevie has to confront the big questions of life and death. This brief synopsis doesn’t do the book justice: it is full of warm and very human characters (none more acerbically funny than Stevie’s down-to-earth mother) and amusing scenes in the playground – you will learn how to play Royal Families – and in the Year Six classroom with Mr Parks, Stevie’s ever-suffering teacher. A gem of a book.

Even if the title were more ambiguous, the pink cover would expertly target the readership for Jodie: This Is the Book of You, or as the spine has it, The Book of You, Jodie (Omnibus Books, $16.99 pb, 185 pp, 9781742990101) by Randa Abdel-Fattah. Jodie begins her first-person narrative in a conversational style familiar from countless American films and television shows: she falls asleep ‘way past’ her bedtime and Mum, who is ‘seriously obsessed’ with housecleaning, has a ‘meltdown’ because she doesn’t make her bed, and then Jodie has a ‘total memory lapse’, which is a – new paragraph – ‘Big mistake’. Only the first page, and already my teeth are on edge: this is a middle-primary novel that wants to be a Young Adult one. If you can ignore the style, or if you are a young reader who thinks it ‘oozes cool’, then Abdel-Fattah has some useful things to say about divorce and blended families.

Jodie’s father is about to marry Carla, and Jodie is finding it hard to share him, while also feeling sorry for her mother. Jodie finds a strange book hidden behind a brick in the library of her school-that-used-to-be-an-orphanage. The pages are blank, but as she holds it a message addressed to her writes itself on the first page from someone promising to be her ‘guide’. As the tale continues, so the bits of wisdom keep appearing. Unfortunately, so do some anonymous bullying blog messages. Although the motive of the Book of You author goes unexplained, eventually both writers are identified and Jodie is able to come to terms with her new domestic situation. Jodie has two girlfriends who offer her support and advice that seemed to this reader more helpful than the Book of You’s enigmatic messages, and both girls will, I suspect, be the subjects of Books Two and Three. Sigh.