Teenage Fiction: Niall MacMonagle finds some new novels that feature what all teenagers most want: stories about people their own age.
Asked for an attention-grabbing, best-selling title, an American publisher once chose Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. Its combination of famous, close-to-famous and pet ticked all the boxes. Publishers are always searching for the successful formula and in JK Rowling's books, with their orphan/ boarding school/wizardry/awakening adolescent mix, found it. But the novels assessed here offer what all teenagers most want: stories about people their own age.
What I Was (Penguin, £10.99), mega-selling Meg Rosoff's third novel, is, yet again, exceptional, memorable. Her narrator, now almost one hundred years old, remembers his 16-year-old self and "the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth".
It's 1962 when he meets beautiful, graceful, calm Finn, whose life in a hut on the beach contrasts with the raw, coarse world of a mediocre Public School. Invitingly intimate and vividly written, Rosoff's book captures the strange sensation of living inside another person's life. It's an odd, lonely love story where little is said but much is felt and, in a strange and startling plot-twist, Rosoff explores infatuation, gender, identity and loss. The East Anglian setting, its sea and fog and history, enriches a narrative that sadly, wisely, tells us "The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday, and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpected, or unresolved". One of those You-Should-Read books.
Imagine a group of teen surfers living in a beach-compound. Now imagine that place pulsing to a "savage heartbeat" and becoming a place of "grief and desperate want". This is what John Brindley does in his futuristic, gripping, thought-provoking and impressive The Rule of Claw (Orion, £9.99). The world we know is remembered only through faded magazine images; the diseased adults have evaporated and ASP comes to mean something other than Admission Strictly Prohibited. Blood-inflated, giant, slug-like leeches, seagles, the Raptors gang, a Boy Rodent, angel Laura, and the idiomatic conversations all display Brindley's imaginative powers through 96 chapters. As in Golding's Lord of the Flies, rivalries increase until Ash, the heroine, proves that it's not the fittest but the most loved that determine evolution.
Oisín McGann's last book journeyed into the future. Now, in Ancient Appetites (Doubleday, £10.95) he combines the rich details of a 19th-century novel with science fiction. The setting is Wicklow and Dublin, post-Famine. We meet high and low life and McGann's creation of engimals or velocycles, mechanical, beastly creatures that are part of the everyday, is his original touch. Nathaniel Wildenstern, born "obscenely rich", is 18. An adventurer, he returns home to discover his brother , also heir to the family fortune, has died suspiciously.
The novel tells of Nate's efforts to discover the truth. The eccentric Wildenstern family, their home, longevity, codes, "rules of Ascension" and gold-healing properties - if gold is applied to their bodies they are reinvigorated/cured - are impressively imagined. A cryptic note, a funeral scene that literally explodes, a Fenian revolt, bog bodies, reviving cadavers, a homosexual affair, make for a well-plotted and absorbing story. How necessary are the engimals? But that's just me. It's a big book for older boys.
This Is What I Did (Andersen, £5.99), by Ann Dee Ellis, sums itself up as "new home, new school, old secret". Logan, 13, is bullied and sees himself as a reject and a loser. Every teenager will recognise the psychological and social unease of school and family interaction. When Logan discovers something terrible about his friend Zyler, he cannot tell, and the dark secret weighs him down. The ugliness and stupidity of bullying, the parents' helplessness, counselling sessions and a crazed assault are powerfully evoked. No gimmickry here, just fine, spare, page-turning writing with superb dialogue. Strongly recommended.
Life on the Refrigerator Door (MacMillan, £7.99), by Alice Kuipers, a novel in notes, confirms that less is more. Claire lives with her divorced, wedded-to-work Mom and their lives connect through notes. The difference a year makes is cleverly, too cleverly, captured. Peter the pet rabbit, recipes, shopping lists, Claire's world of school and boys and baby-sitting, the rows all figure until Mom's breast cancer begins to dominate. The tone is immediate, real, and the plot, though at times slight and strained, propels. You'll read it in an hour and remember it long afterwards.
In Rainbow's End (Hodder £5.99), by Joan O'Neill, 17-year-old, spirited Ellie has left Ireland and dreams of running her own hat business in Boston. The rag trade, business deals, a childhood sweetheart, a new romance, a trip to Paris, a Hyannis party (Coco Chanel and Louis Armstrong have walk-on parts), a missing sister, melancholia, a hut in the woods all make the plot rattle, roll and, yes, sometimes creak.
The love story comes and goes and, though things happen that dampen Ellie's American Dream, wedding bells, eventually, ring. This is chick lit for teenagers: charming, improbable, action-packed and two-dimensional.
Julie Hearn's Hazel (Oxford, £5.99) begins dramatically: a fallen horse, an injured jockey, a trampled woman. Thirteen-year-old Hazel instinctively knows that when suffragette Emily Davison throws herself in front of the King's horse at the Epsom derby on June 4th, 1913, that it was "not a sudden act of madness but a moment of perfect glory". Hearn skilfully refracts history through Hazel's questioning intelligence. Fresh and saucy in its treatment of school and home, the novel contains several crises and Hazel's journey to the Caribbean and back mirrors another journey, that of the emerging self. In her handling of this Hearn has produced an entertaining and enjoyable book.
Reading Simmone Howell's Notes From the Teenage Underground (Bloomsbury, £6.99) is as easy as eating ice-cream. A wicked pleasure. Seventeen-year-old movie-buff Gem (yes, named for that Germaine!) asks: "How shallow is high school? Mira dropped a few pounds, started wearing labels, and her stock skyrocketed". She and her friends are on the lookout for boys, "Boho boys. Dangerous boys. Boys without bar codes" because "bar code boys are irrefutably blah". But likeable, streetwise Gem is too intelligent and individual for pool parties and "adventures in retail". This sassy, sharp Australian story looks at family and friends, a memorable mother, an absent father, peer pressures, and it will resonate with global village teenagers everywhere.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin