“His name was Count Bastien Saphir, but today, most people know him by his moniker: Monsieur Le Bleu,” Mallory tells the visitors on the House Saphir tour, an activity that particularly appeals to “heathens and outcasts”, crammed as it is with “torture and dismemberment”.
It’s a smart way to open a Bluebeard retelling, allowing the protagonist to recap the old tale for newcomers as well as establish the particular setting for this version, in which “the veil had fallen more than seventeen years before, unleashing dark magic and curses and monsters into the mortal world”. The House Saphir (Faber & Faber, £8.99) is not Marissa Meyer’s first rodeo, of course; this latest title follows numerous other reimagined fairy tales from the American author, including the futuristic world of the Lunar Chronicles series (featuring a cyborg Cinderella) and the Gilded duology (two words: sexy Rumpelstiltskin).
Meyer’s Bluebeard has been dead for more than a century by the time we meet Mallory, who ekes out a living alongside her sister by pretending to have inherited their mother’s talents for witchcraft. While she thinks herself a fraud, it is true that she can see ghosts – including two of Bluebeard’s murdered wives – and between that and a lot of showmanship, she gets by. Enter Armand, descendant of Monsieur Le Bleu and heir to the Saphir estate, who hires Mallory and her sister to exorcise his ghost. He’s charming, handsome, and quite possibly out to continue his great-grandfather’s legacy of murdering young women.
We may quickly suspect what’s coming – “She told herself this wasn’t love, before sliding her arms around his neck and kissing him again” – but Meyer weaves a captivating story, with the reader always rooting for the imperfect but gutsy heroine. The twists and turns never grow tiresome, and the final confrontation, in particular, is beautifully handled.
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Irish-Indian poet Nikita Gill is another writer with experience of retellings, turning her attention to the Greek gods in her latest verse novel, Hekate (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). As with much of Gill’s work, there is a particular attentiveness to mother-daughter relationships in this version of Hekate’s story, which depicts the offspring of Perses and Asteria as “a child of war”, raised in the underworld “between bones and ghosts” while yearning for her lost parents.
Hekate may be immortal but she is also unsure of what the Fates have in store for her, and at times her heart aches as fiercely as any human’s. She also begins to notice how women are viewed as “dangerous” if they are “unpredictable”, feared “by Gods and men alike”. Though occasionally a little earnest in its intent – a prologue tells us that “at the soul of this story / is the divine Goddess within us all” – this accessible, feminist reinterpretation of the myth will appeal to reluctant readers and classics nerds alike.
The recent explosion of true crime podcasts and the (related) success of the murder-mystery genre in YA fiction has led to many titles in which teenagers are all too ready to play detective at the slightest provocation. Authors sometimes forget, in their excitement at inventing twists and red herrings, how vital it is that adolescent investigators have a pressing motivation to take on this role. The best mysteries in this field give us characters with an authentic, personal connection to the whodunnit, rather than just an abstract desire to see justice done or a puzzle solved.
Add Joelle Wellington’s Girls Who Play Dead (Harper Fire, £8.99) to the list of excellent YA mysteries, alongside titles by Karen McManus and Holly Jackson. From the beginning, the reader is intrigued by who might have murdered Erin, the blond and beautiful influencer with ties to Cook Cosmetics, a business empire founded in the small town of Prophets Lake. That the main characters are Erin’s black best friend, Kyla, and Kyla’s anxiety-ridden older brother, Mikky, allows for some social commentary alongside the inevitable Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars vibes – we know that neither of their deaths would have prompted nearly as much fuss. “Prophets Lake is liberal for a small town, which is to say, not very liberal at all.”
The story, however, avoids preachiness; what appeals is the thoughtful characterisation. Mikky, who returns home after three years away in order to support Kyla through her grief, has a clear-eyed view of the kind of classroom politics that once felt unbearable. He “sees how eager his classmates are to be different. So eager that they all actually read the same. It’s ... reassuring. To know that it wasn’t only him who didn’t feel at home in his own skin once.” Similarly, Kyla may have adopted some of her dead friend’s mean-girl tactics, but she’s also resourceful and resilient, a complex creation to empathise with even if we may occasionally suspect her of murder. A tremendously satisfying novel.
Complexity is, as the title suggests, also at play in debut writer Hannah Marshall’s It’s A Bit More Complicated Than That (Allen & Unwin, £8.99), set in her native New Zealand. Seventeen-year-old Zelle is “a tornado. A fuming storm in the shape of a girl.” Callum and his friends haven’t seen her in three years, but now she’s back in town: “The last thing any of us need, or want, is to have a Zelle-sized bomb dropped on our lives.” Nevertheless, in this “little corner of Central Otago”, it’s tricky to avoid anyone, and the nuanced account of Zelle’s awkward interactions with her old friends rings true throughout.
Part of the tension derives from the slowly unspooling secrets around the event that prompted Zelle’s departure as well as causing the death of a friend, but the messy feelings around it all are – again, check that title – more tangled and authentic than we might imagine. Marshall’s characters spring from the page, fully alive and deeply relatable.
Finally, secrets held tight also propel much of Xixi Tian’s second novel, All the Way Around the Sun (Penguin, £9.99). The initial generic premise – old childhood friends are forced to reunite on a road trip to visit college campuses, with possible kissing ahead – gives way to something much more complicated as narrator Stella confronts the popular Alan about his abandonment of her years before, but is also forced to face other kinds of grief.
For Stella, the prospect of college makes her “physically ill” – yet another new place after her early childhood in China, a disorienting move to America, and a recent relocation to perennially sunny California after her high-achieving brother’s untimely death. It’s not something she can discuss with her parents (“I studied them and knew that if I opened a crack in the fortress we had built around ourselves, we would crumble into nothing”) or her peers (“The things they were worried about seemed so banal ... Other people didn’t know the worst that could happen. I did”). Alan is perhaps the only person she can speak to, but their fragile reconciliation is not a panacea.
A thoughtful exploration of identity and assimilation, with some observations on cultural norms that might resonate for some Irish readers too: “I felt oddly exposed talking about my feelings, like an oyster pried open on its hinges ... Only American families got into those things.” Compelling and moving.
