Here are capsule reviews of some of the latest books for children and young adults:

• "Ivy & Bean: Doomed to Dance," by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall. (Ages 5 and up.)
Pals Ivy and Bean fall in love with the idea of ballet dancing after reading a thrilling account of "Giselle." They particularly like the part in which Giselle and a troop of ballerinas with long fingernails surround a duke and "dance him to death. To death!"
They beg their skeptical mothers to sign them up for ballet. It turns out to be much less exciting than "Giselle," especially when Madame Joy ("Jwah," as teacher's pet Dulcie pronounces it) assigns the girls the parts of "two friendly squid" in a recital called "Wedding Beneath the Sea."
Ivy and Bean know this is the sort of role that goes to the worst dancers. They think about how it will feel to pretend to be friendly squids in front of a large audience. Then a visit to the aquarium suggests a new way to look their part.

• "I Am Jack," by Susanne Gervay. (Ages 8 to 12.)
Jack's a good kid, but when he beats the school bully at handball, his unanticipated reward is a new nickname, courtesy of his opponent, who calls him Butt Head.
Before long, the nasty nickname catches on, even with kids who like Jack. He becomes the target of spitball attacks and relentless taunts. His grades falter, and his headaches ramp up.
When another student finally tells what's happening, the school principal gets involved, and things turn around. Thoughtful, pragmatic and realistic.

• "The Giant-Slayer," by Iain Lawrence. (Ages 9 and up.)
A master of combining wit and terror, Lawrence is a perfect writer for young adults, with a keen sense of the jagged rhythms of adolescence.
Here, he juxtaposes a gobsmacking fantasy that a girl invents for hospitalized friends living in iron lungs. Early on, a cynical polio patient nails the nascent story's bad guy, a giant, as an analogy for polio, the despised disease they share.
But the nuanced characters (in fantasy and in the hospital) are anything but stereotypes. It's an extraordinary book from a writer whose shoulders comfortably bear Roald Dahl's mantle. "The Giant-Slayer" should be in the library of anyone shadowed by disability or disease.

• "Back Home," by Julia Keller. (Ages 9 to 12).
When 13-year-old Brownie learns an explosion has horrifically damaged her father and killed his fellow soldiers in Iraq, she can't imagine how he's been changed. Preparing for his return, she learns new words: "Comatose. Prosthesis. Aphasia. Dura mater. Frontal lobe. Subdural hematoma," but doesn't understand them all that well.
Nothing prepares her for the sight of the man slumped in the wheelchair, one leg of his sweatpants hanging empty. "What if, from now on, this was it? This was how our family was going to be?" she asks herself. It's an affecting story that speaks to countless families, answering that very question.

• "The Book of the Maidservant," by Rebecca Barnhouse. (Ages 12 and up.)
Johanna, a medieval girl, chronicles her reluctant journey when she accompanies her mistress, the self-styled holy woman Dame Margery, from their small English village to the holy city of Rome.
Margery, based on the 15th-century autobiography "The Book of Margery Kempe," may have been a sainthood candidate back in the day. Her constant histrionics - tearful outbursts every time she reflects on the Virgin Mary's pain, constant announcements on behalf of Our Lord or Our Lady in Heaven - illustrate her piety (and her mental stability).
The rest of the pilgrims, including Johanna, are governed by a hybrid of superstition and faith that forces them to accept Margery's holy visions.
This unsentimental view of medieval life - streets cluttered with puddles and piles flung from bedpans, tubs of eels that can be smelled before they're seen - would be a fantastic accompaniment for anyone reading Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

• "Blue Plate Special," by Michelle D. Kwasney. (Ages 12 and up.)
Told in three alternating voices, this quiet, powerful story illustrates William Faulkner's famous line, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
Chubby Madeline, adolescent caretaker of her alcoholic mother, cannot believe her luck when love blossoms between her and an insightful McDonald's staffer. It's a relationship that's easily the best of the three chronicled here.
Desiree, impregnated after her mother's nasty boyfriend rapes her, allows an infatuated high school classmate to think the baby is his.
Meanwhile, Ariel is so attuned to figuring out her boyfriend's moods that she hardly knows herself anymore.
Eventually, the three stories braid together. That revelation is so striking that what follows is almost anticlimactic.

• "We Were Here," by Matt de la Pena. (Ages 13 and up.)
Right away, Miguel, the troubled narrator, hints at the horrific deed that landed him in juvenile court. Expecting to be "put away for a grip of years because of what I did," instead Miguel is assigned to a year in a group home and required to keep a journal.
Miguel can hardly credit his luck, yet knows he deserves the worst possible punishment. In juvi, he almost gets it when he butts heads with resident psychopath Mong, and ticks off Rondell, a latter-day incarnation of Lenny from "Of Mice and Men."
The three form a slightly uneasy alliance and conspire to run away together, without much of a plan beyond that act. They wobble between boyhood and something else that's not quite adulthood as Miguel struggles to sort himself out.
The language is raw, with dicey situations few parents would wish on their adolescent children, but the story carries street cred similar to Sistah Soljah's "Midnight" and similar tough novels.

• "Raven Summer," by David Almond. (Ages 13 and up.)
Two boys in Northumberland stumble upon an abandoned baby in a field. Or did a raven lead them to the tiny foundling? The note pinned to her blanket reads, "Plese look after her rite. This is a childe of God."
In a story that opens with, "It starts and ends with the knife," establishing a faint but discernibly menacing undertow, Almond examines the elastic boundaries between childhood and adult responsibilities.
Liam, one of the foundling discoverers, finds himself drawn into a friendship with Oliver, a young Liberian refugee whose family is slaughtered in a military coup, and Crystal, a girl who introduces herself by saying, bluntly, "I'm trouble."
Is that why she bears "dark scars at her shoulderblades"? And is Oliver telling the truth about himself?

Book reviewer Claire Martin writes for The Denver Post.