When Lowe concentrates on her story and avoids blatantly signposting her central character’s reactions, her writing is both evocative and enlightening. We meet Matthew, who lives in far-north Western Australia, when he gets lost on a solitary bush outing and is helped by an Aboriginal girl. He calls her No Name because, following the death of a relative, her real name cannot be spoken. Matthew’s determination to get to know No Name and her people brings him into conflict with his parents though their prejudices soften eventually. The book’s ending, which involves a painful move for Matthew but one that makes him resolve one day to return, is genuinely affecting.

This Summer Last (Puffin, $8.95 pb) is oppressively glum rather than didactic. Lee-Anne Levy’s eleven-year-old narrator, Abby, tells how her family finally comes to terms with the accidental death of her two-year-old brother. In the book’s first part we see how, even a full year after the tragedy, the whole family has effectively conspired not to talk about the event, yet allow it to circumscribe their lives. Abby and her older brother, Dane, for instance, are as usual holidaying with their grandparents near the sea but are forbidden to visit the beach where the accident happened. Their parents, who have customarily holidayed with them, are trying separately to cope with their grief. Abby fills the resulting emotional void by befriending an old woman, the death of whose own baby many years ago conveniently enables her to understand Abby’s feelings.

Levy is so single-minded in conveying the sadness and torment that besets Abby and her family that the result is extremely heavy, hardly likely to give that joyous charge that even the saddest books paradoxically can impart. I can’t imagine who will enjoy (as distinct from admire, or make use of) the book. Children in situations like Abby’s are likely to be depressed rather than enlightened. So presumably it is well-meaning adults, teachers in particular, who are in the publisher’s sights. Like The Girl with No Name, This Summer Last seems designed to fill an easily defined (but worthy) educational gap in the publisher’s list.

I spent some time, too, wondering about the meaning of the syntactically strained title and lamenting the careless use on page 45 of ‘Here! Here!’ for the exhortation ‘Hear! Hear!’.

More straightforwardly structured than This Summer Last, Levy’s Jake (Ashton Scholastic, $7.95pb) is a little lighter in tone, though that may be because the subject, albeit serious, isn’t as gloomy. Foster child hardened, superficially at least, by frequent changes of home, thirteen-year-old Jake comes to live on a farm in the mid-west of New South Wales with Peter and his family. He’s distant and detached until Wally, the farm dog, in blithely canine fashion, insists on befriending him. Jake retreats again, however, when Wally is run over.

Levy is effective in portraying Jake’s sullen defensiveness and Peter’s growth out of the frustration and envy he feels at first when Jake is allowed to skip school and is excused from helping on the farm. Peter finally comes to understand Jake’s behaviour, and his intervention is central to the book’s moving conclusion. There’s no question about Levy’s skill, shown in both these books, in dissecting the behavioural nuances and psychological complexities of troubled children. But if she is to encourage readers to take up other books, not least her own, she may need to alleviate the darkness of her themes with more lightness in their treatment.

Caroline Macdonald’s touch in Spider Mansion (Viking, $16.95 pb) is as light as the web traced on the book’s seductive cover. And almost surreptitiously the tale weaves such a web of enchantment that my critical faculties might have been immobilised had my disappointment at the end not freed me from the spell.

Fourteen-year-old Chrissie Day has given the nickname Spider Mansion to the remote South Australian homestead where she lives with her parents. Their need to keep up mortgage repayments has led them to offer gourmet weekend holidays. When the Todd family arrives one weekend, they keep finding excuses not to leave, and end up attempting to discredit the Days and drive them away. After her father proves to be ineffectual and her mother succumbs to her fondness for whisky-induced oblivion, Chrissie has to rely on her own resourcefulness to get the Todds to leave.

Macdonald’s sharply-observed depiction of the inexorable progress of the Todds’ takeover made me wince at times. She makes the Days’ combination of unsuspecting cooperativeness, commercial vulnerability, and slightly puzzled acceptance of guilt disturbingly believable. What I found less effective was the book’s last sequence, which leaves a huge loose end. Perhaps a sequel is planned, but I would have preferred a more conclusive and satisfying ending. Also, notwithstanding its elaborate cover, the book is overpriced for a paperback. Compare it with Nadia Wheatley’s The Night Tolkien Died (Random, $19.95 hb), which is not only a hardcover with a sewn binding, printed in an unusual typeface on wonderfully attractive creamy paper, but costs only $3 more than Spider Mansion.

The commitment of Wheatley’s publisher to the book’s durability is even more notable given that it’s a collection of short stories. But what stories! There are twelve, three of which have been published previously. They are astonishingly varied in theme, point of view, tone, and characters. There’s no self-indulgence or talking down, and the language throughout is richly allusive. It’s hard to single out stories for special mention, but ‘Land/scape’ is remarkable for its touching insight into the gradual reconciliation between an estranged father and son. Then there’s ‘The Known Soldier’, short, poignant, and very moving. And the psychologically complex ‘Unforgettable’, the piquantly vengeful ‘Listening to Mondrian’ and the morally challenging title story. Every one of them reaffirms the wisdom of publishing the collection in such lasting form.

The Night Tolkien Died sets a new benchmark for young adult fiction. Indeed many of the stories would reward ‘old’ adults (providing they get past the naïve dustjacket, which seems to invite mainly the youngest of the book’s potential readers) and, though all of them come across with perfect clarity, not once did I feel held by the throat and forced to recognise and acknowledge their every smart sentiment.