"The False Prince" and "The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom" The business of children's books can seem, for reader and author alike, a bit like buying a ticket for the lottery: from many similar-seeming scraps of paper, one or two will hit the jackpot, while most will be tossed or remaindered. Baffling enough in the big book world, this disproportion, in which one book gets so much and the others so little, is particularly baffling when it comes to fantasy literature for younger readers. That a lottery seems unpredictable is, of course, what makes it a lottery - still, the difference between, say, the commercially mighty "Eragon" and all the other Tolkien followers seems so minute one doubts anyone could have predicted its peculiar appeal. However random the outcome, we at least know the tickets come stamped in two ways: "I'll take the jokey one, you take the spooky one," the 12-year-old reader said with a sigh, taking up her father's offer to split the work (and rewards) of reading and reviewing in turn two new fantasy adventures for children, "The False Prince," by Jennifer A. Nielsen, and "The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom," by Christopher Healy. Though the covers of both advertise tales about princes, the 12-year-old knows - a little eerily and in less than half a glance - which one is which kind, and what's more knows there will be only two kinds: that fantasy fiction for younger readers these days bends either toward the whimsical and inventive or the dark and fatalistic. This is true even of new classics. "Harry Potter," for all the blood and willed shadows of its last chapters, delights because of its jokes; it is Dobby and Gilderoy Lockhart and the Sorting Hat that make the reader hang on through the tediously ominous Voldemort hissings. Meanwhile, for all its mordant satirical side glances at what Mitt Romney's America might be like, "The Hunger Games" gives pleasure because of its spooks. The classic dystopian pursuit of the logical outcome of current circumstances (in this case, the bottomless cruelty of a society of competitive spectacle) is what makes it memorable. Tolkien, in an act of will, long ago brought together creatures of the two kingdoms - the lovable hobbits out of Grahame and Milne along with the darker William Morris-inspired dwarves and trolls - but the two realms have drifted apart ever since. Some of us write essentially whimsical, sentimental books; others, dark sagas. "The False Prince," by Jennifer A. Nielsen ("Elliot and the Goblin War"), to start with the father-reads-first one, is, as the 12-year-old spied, entirely an instance of the Spooky. A grim story that takes an occasional, though only very occasional, mordant turn, it tells how four orphaned boys are captured and kept hostage in the austere medieval kingdom called Carthya, whose topography and neighboring kingdoms are shown in an utterly typical fantasy map on the frontispiece. Snatched from their not very pleasant institution, the boys, we soon learn, are exploited by their new owner, the aristocratic Conner, as pawns in a plot to replace the pirate-slain Prince Jaron of Carthya with a plausible impostor. Put through brutal training in the arts of princedom, they sense that while whoever learns best will become the new prince, the others are almost certain to be assassinated. The central drama lies in the contest of wills between Sage, the most defiant of the orphans, and the cruel but (we are led to believe) essentially virtuous Conner, who may be brutal but is trying to keep the kingdom from civil war, fomented by Lord Santhias Veldergreth. And if you do not suss out at the first mention that Veldergreth is a bad "un, you have not read spooky pseudo-medieval fantasies. The other would-be princes are there, it seems, to sustain a modicum of suspense, while an apparently mute serving girl named Imogen dashes in and out of the narrative, to serve and warn the hero, in the manner of ambivalent servant girls since Karamaneh in Sax Rohmer's "Fu Manchu" books. But, as the 12-year-old pointed out, since the book is narrated by Sage we know that whatever happens will not end with his murder, tamping down a possibility of jeopardy. Written in the short, succinct paragraphs and cliffhanger chapter endings recommended by professional children's book writers, "The False Prince" has a surprisingly vague sense of place and particulars. Conner's office was lined with shelves full of books and the occasional bust or trinket. Near the back of the room, he had a massive desk that faced the door, and two comfortable chairs faced the desk. It made me wonder if he had a business through which he earned his own money. And an extremely cool plot twist near the climax is related in a similarly pedestrian manner: key, missing information suddenly offered in third-person, "here's what you didn't know" narration, while the fantasy world throughout seems to lie flat on a map with Scrabble names, rather than being realized in full. Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include "The Steps Across the Water" and, most recently, "The Table Comes First."