The long summer break begins.

And with it, for children, the hours upon hours to be spent or misspent, some of them perhaps lost in a good book. This isn't the summer of any major children's book launch – no new Philip Pullman or JK Rowling – but there are still plenty of fictional journeys to be had.

For the eight to 12-year-old group, for instance, there is the world of the young Precious Ramotswe in her "wee hoose by a clachan" in Botswana, finding herself with a detective case "richt fore her neb". Precious And The Mischief At Meerkat Brae (Itchy Coo, £9.99) is the second of Alexander McCall Smith's mysteries to have been written for children and translated into Scots, with no English version as yet published.

The aspiring eight-year-old detective Precious – who as an adult will evolve into the heroine of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series – is made more intimate, more familiar, by her blossoming in Scots. These stories feel like they are meant to be read aloud by, or perhaps with, your kids, revelling in the sounds and also the act of storytelling.

Precious and Scots are a good fit – or at least translator James Robertson makes them so. Perhaps they are even too neat a fit, since the stories appear so perfectly matched to Scots as to make it seem like a foreign language, one perhaps born in Botswana rather than here. These words and their story seem to belong to some other place that is both here and there, a slower, more rural, non-urban Scotland, where it's quite a thing for "grandmother" to have more than twa teeth.

Taking the imagination further afield, to the Himalayas, and written in good satirical, colonial English, is The Abominables by Eva Ibbotson (Scholastic, £6.99), the tale of a Victorian-era girl, Lady Farlingham, who finds herself abducted by a daddy yeti and ends up raising his three children. One of the appeals of Ibbotson's farcical romp across a century and a bit in the company of a bunch of abominable snowmen is that it appears to come out of another age and stand apart from the trends of the moment. This is partly because Ibbotson wrote it in the late 1990s and this is a posthumous publication. But it is also because the writer, author of Journey To The River Sea, has very much her own quirky and whimsical voice.

Ibbotson's yetis are kind and gentle creatures who have been brought up to have manners and to say grace before eating. When they cry, they weep rivers. At one point, they cry "so hard their fur becomes dark and wet, like huge walruses". In other words, they are far too nice ever to be exposed to the modern world and human exploitation. But, in this moving and insightful tale, meet that world they do.

Among the books for the upper end of this age group, Binny For Short (Bloomsbury, £9.99) by Hilary McKay stands out for its melancholic comedy and nailing of the eccentricities of family life. McKay excels in the struggles of slightly odd and out of place families, and Binny's family, the Cornwallis tribe, certainly have had a rough time of it. They're of a tough type though that keeps soldiering on, though. Ever-resourceful mum goes back and forth looking for "the sort of job that fitted with school hours, the car, three children and no childcare", while big sister Clem sells her skis, skates and camera in order to pay for flute lessons.

McKay really revels in what goes on in children's heads; especially all that is stubbornly awkward and strange. Binny seems to have her own distinctive brand of insensitivity and obsessiveness, which is what gets her into trouble, but she also has charm. Come what may – the death of her grandmother, the passing away of her aunt, moving to a new house – she never lets go of the idea of getting back her dog Max, who it seems was given away by Auntie Violet, a woman who has the same insensitivity gene as Binny. Someone else seems to have it too: Binny's special friend, boy-next-door Gareth is a like-mind and perfect match for her – "so handy, so alien, so entirely insensitive that she didn't have to bother about his feelings at all".

Offerings at the teen end of the market are mostly dominated by a Gothic darkness, from Twilight-inspired romances to creepy tales of gentle horror. Through Dead Eyes (Bloomsbury, £10.99) by Chris Priestley is among the more unsettling of these. It's set in Amsterdam, where a teenage boy, still reeling from the divorce of his parents and desertion by his mother, is accompanying his father on a work trip. His dad has little time for him. The hotel is creepy and unsettling. But it's the mask he discovers in the old town market that disturbs him most of all.

Is he just emotionally troubled? Amsterdam's old town is rendered a chilling, disorienting and Gothic environment, its iconography, buildings and waterways as grotesque and strange as Venice, similarly, was in the film Don't Look Now. But it is the boy's sadness, his own wounded and haunted quality, that most engages.

Meanwhile, it's not only vampires that human girls shouldn't kiss or fall in love with, Twilight-style. There are also, as we find in Helen Douglas's debut novel After Eden (Bloomsbury, £6.99), boys coming back from a future time to rescue the Earth, who are duty-bound not to give away their mission and not get involved.

In some ways, these post-Twilight tales are abstinence novels – all about putting in place barriers, in a time when there are few – between two lovers getting it together. There are plenty of cliches here. Ryan, of course, is muscular, handsome and has every girl falling over herself to get to him. But this is nevertheless an intriguing play on the familiar formula of teen romance – and a piece of sci-fi that acknowledges that astronomy and the night sky do not solely belong to geeks.

But perhaps the most interesting and well-written young adult books out there are those that are looking outwards globally, and questioning and challenging the state of the world. The young adult market appears to be fostering the radical, even in unexpected mainstream places such as John Grisham's fourth instalment in his Kid Lawyer series, Theodore Boone: The Activist (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99). Thirteen-year-old Theodore dreams of being a "famous trial lawyer" or great judge, but here his passion for fairness gets channelled into a community campaign against the construction of a bypass.

The book starts well. Boone is a rather compelling figure, wandering round with his dog, Judge, slightly ignored by his parents and mainly just allowed to get on with his own nerdy passion for the law. But the plot is perhaps a little too educational, too clunky, and seems to lurch from one moral, ethical or leadership dilemma to the next as if in preparation for the list of exam-style essay questions that do appear at the back of the book.

Grisham tugs the heart strings when Boone's dog is attacked and badly injured; he works on our sympathy when he is pulled up for his poor leadership skill on a Scout trip. But it all starts to drag when it spends a few long chapters describing what seems a primer for activists planning to make a protest video and campaign.

The Wall by William Sutcliffe (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is, however, the must-read for any teen, or even adult, this summer. This is a book which is clearly about Israel and Palestine but never mentions them. Sutcliffe deftly depicts two contrasting worlds that butt up against a Wall in this tale of a teenage boy, who, while playing football in Amarias, a "quiet, clean, just built" neighbourhood, discovers a hole in the ground leading to the other side.

This tunnel, which he takes, is like a wormhole, leading to a whole different universe. The buildings are not properly built, not painted, their contents spilling out onto the street. A girl who rescues him seems to ask him for food. He wonders whether it is safe to drink the water. He is told he will never get back to the other side if he tries to go through a checkpoint.

Atmospheric and tense, punctuated by claustrophobic sections in the tunnel and terrifying on-foot chases, this is also a passionate and moving coming-of-age tale. It is a portrait of fractured family life and of the impact of conflict on individuals. After his first expedition to the other side of the wall, Joshua returns late, dirty, bruised and battered. His mother, who has been distant from him since his father's death, grasps him tight in her arms and says, "I thought you'd gone." Joshua, glad to have this clinch of connection and affection, thinks, "I thought you'd gone."