Hmmm, definitely sensing a trend this fall… With steampunk having been biggish recently and all the atttention to the new Sherlock Holmes reworks and spinoffs, I guess it was bound to happen that the hottest new thing would be over a hundred years old. 
Dodger
by Terry Pratchett
Transworld
ISBN: 978 0 385 61927 1
So imagine the Artful Dodger was based on a real person known as Dodger that Charles Dickens met. And then imagine that he keeps getting involved in situations that seem to make him a hero, and everyone – including Mr. Dickens – is getting interested in him, so he starts mingling with middle and upper classes and learning to blend better. And those situations of his? Involve famous characters like Sweeney Todd, Robert Peel, the police commissioner, and international politics that draw the interest of Disraeli. By the end of the book, he is quite set as an unacknowledged employee of the government, you might say.
It’s a lot to cram into one novel – maybe even too much. As skilled and fun a writer as Pratchett usually is, it did feel like he threw in everything right up to the kitchen sink and didn’t want to trim out any of his ideas. Still, it is a fun ride. It is, however, dense with historical figures, details of lower-class Victorian life, and the street slang of the time, none of which is explained or spelled out. For this reason, I would recommend this not for children, but for teens, and strong teen readers, at that, who may have enough of the general knowledge and ability to infer meanings to words to be able to read this – or the willingness to look them up rather than getting discouraged.
Becoming Holmes
by Shane Peacock
Tundra Books
ISBN: 978 1 77049 232 5
This is the sixth and final novel in an award-winning series about Sherlock’s younger years. Malefactor has been a thorn in Sherlock’s side throughout the series, and now, the young sleuth suspects him of murdering his own double-crossing employee. As he tries to prove it, hoping to bring down his archenemy, he discovers that there are greater and more dangerous things in play than he had imagined.
Peacock includes plenty of detail of Victorian life as well, but his books are definitely less dense with it and are quite accessible for kids, even with their finely developed sense of menace. This series has been very popular, and if you know a kid who has been reading them, you will definitely want to see that this gets into their hands!
Also available as an ebook.