“She is net-curtain thin. Just a veil of herself. Freckles like the start of rain on dry ground, little scar above her eyebrow, bright wet shine of teeth. When I blink, her features drip and spread like running paint. There are drag marks down her right flank, pure tarmac. A rip in her dress, bone-deep. The bruise on her temple is black and shadowed where a piece of her skull has caved in. She turns and grins at me, a mouthful of yellowing smoke. My beautiful friend.”
We get the above gorgeousness a mere page into Jenny Valentine’s latest novel, Us in the Before and After (Simon & Schuster, £8.99), a tale of two friends having an unusual summer, owing to one of them being dead. The quirkiness and the immediately appealing voice will be familiar to fans of the British author, who’s been winning prizes and acclaim for her work for young people since 2007′s Finding Violet Park; newer devotees will be eager to delve into her backlist.
Narrator Elk and her best friend Mab are like “entangled particles” (a physics metaphor used with a light touch throughout), but something happened just before the summer that changed everything. Elk was keeping a secret, and the fallout of that decision is what – it seems – has led to the current state of affairs. The magical realism is grounded by sharp observations about teenage social dynamics; at one point Elk notes the gift of being “left alone” at school: “I learned pretty quickly that I could be myself and get away with it. I’m not sure anything inside a school building is worth more than that.”
This hauntingly honest (and indeed hauntingly haunted) book may make you cry, in between appreciating beautiful sentences and astute insights. It’s worth it. I adored this novel in its own right, but also as a reminder of how YA as a label encompasses such a wide range of writing, from the highly commercial, page-turning variety to the more literary, often quietly devastating end of things.
The commercial-literary spectrum is reflected, too, in Charlie Castelletti’s anthology He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan, £18.99), with a mix of what we might call “internet-famous” and canonical poets included (hello there, Whitman, Auden, Marlowe). It’d be naive and reductive to insist that any poem popular on social media must be simplistic (or to attribute depth to an older text simply because the language feels more formal and closer to something studied for an exam), though, and some of the best poems in here have gone viral: Jay Hulme’s Jesus at the Gay Bar, for example, is an extremely welcome inclusion, and the always excellent Nikita Gill also features.
But there are weaker notes, including some of Castelletti’s own work, and some poems that regurgitate but do little else with activist slogans, that seem to think that repeating catchphrases and adding line breaks equals depth. It’s also not always wise to include performance pieces on the page; not all of them will work when stripped of what their reader brings on stage.
Then you stumble upon a bit of Frank O’Hara or Ocean Vuong and you’d forgive anything.
It’s also refreshing to have a collection like this that isn’t – despite the aforementioned geniuses – solely from the United States, that knows other countries exist. The younger generation of queer Irish poets are particularly well represented here, with Micheál McCann, Rosamund Taylor, Eva Griffin and William Keohane all turning up to do the country proud. As imperfect as this anthology is – and all are, for reasons as much to do with copyright and permissions as personal taste – it’s one worth having on the shelf, for solace and celebration alike.
That magical power of poetry is explored in Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s verse novel Wild East (Penguin, £8.99), the third book from the poet and lecturer but his first for teens. I am always sceptical of how writers, drawing on their own experiences in schools, handle the visiting-poet workshop from the students’ perspective, but when we see “this nosy poet has been / spying my words over my shoulder”, leaving the narrator feeling “like he’s barged in on me / sitting on the toilet or something”, it won me over.
It takes 14-year-old Ronny, a newcomer to the school and someone who has never quite felt literature is “for” him, a while to warm to this “messing around with poetry”, and to become comfortable using this form to share his feelings about injustice, identity and the horrific death of his best friend. This book earns its hopeful ending.
For delightfully snarky commentary alongside the hope, please see Josh Silver’s Dead Happy (Rock the Boat, £8.99), picking up where his near-dystopian Happy Head left off. Five seemingly perfect couples undergo a series of strange challenges on a remote island, led by a charismatic pair fond of grandiose language. (“Vessel? It’s a fruit bowl, Artemis. I’ve seen them in Ikea.”) Narrator Seb gives us an appealing blend of wisecracking and vulnerable as he tries to figure out a way out, and to uncover what happened to his boyfriend; the redemption arc of his fake-girlfriend is particularly pleasing.
The power of community and solidarity is explored beautifully in two titles this month. Debut Anna Zoe Quirke’s Something to be Proud Of (Little Tiger, £8.99) introduces us to Imogen, “a chaotic, leftist, autistic bisexual who wants to be a stand-up comedian”, following her throughout a year between two Pride events. The first reminds her that she lives in “a world that was built neither by nor for people like me”; the second is her hard-fought-for response, a more inclusive and thoughtful Pride that allows “all queer people to celebrate who they are, all of who they are”. If a little clunky in places, it’s also heartwarming.
Bestselling authors Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar team up for Four Eids and a Funeral (Usborne, £8.99), which uses the romantic comedy formula as an accessible way into a story about Muslim communities in New England. Former best friends Said and Tiwa are forced to pair up when left joint custody of a cat, and then choose to pool their strengths when the local Islamic centre burns down.
The mayor doesn’t think it’s worth rebuilding the place, insisting existing public spaces should serve everyone’s needs. “There will be no more getting together,” Tiwa thinks, “breaking fasts together for the last time during Eid al-Fitr. No more Arabic sessions. No more community.” Tiwa’s campaigning is complicated by how she’s not always “read” as Muslim by strangers; as Said puts it, “I know that if [her family] were Arab or South Asian or any race and ethnicity other than Black, everyone here would have been clamouring to praise Tiwa for her hard work instead of me.”
Such concerns don’t get in the way of this gentle enemies-to-lovers romance, as befits the genre; the original spanner-in-the-works for the pair is less fully realised, however, and as much as we know these two will get together – and root for it – it’d be lovely to have a stronger reason for their initial distance.
As with Quirke’s novel, though, the impulse here is admirable – to demonstrate to teenagers that – and how – they can effect change in their communities.
