Children’s book reviews – Patrick Ness, Sarah Crossan and Maureen White

Patrick Ness’s new young-adult novel, The Rest of Us Just Live Here (Walker Books, £12.99), will do nothing to diminish his popularity with his numerous fans. It is a book that succeeds in being simultaneously provocative, entertaining and witty, while exhibiting a profound and empathetic understanding of the phenomenon often too casually referred to as “growing up”. The characterisation of the young people whose stories we follow is subtle and psychologically convincing. Their fluctuating relationships with one another and with their extended family worlds are adroitly delineated.

We are in “a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a city” somewhere in Washington state. Four young friends, all in their late teens, all bright and articulate, are in their final month at high school, looking forward to their graduation, their prom and their future studies at college. Their lives are dominated by a sense of expectation. As Mikey, the narrator, expresses it at one point, “It felt like I was waiting for something to happen,” adding, “which has to be the worst part of being young.” It is part of Ness’s skill as a writer to capture, often very touchingly, the melancholy, the yearning and the dreaming that typify the waiting process we know as adolescence.

Mikey and his friends, we are frequently reminded, are ordinary, as distinct from extraordinary, young people. They live in the real world, squabble with their misunderstanding and misunderstood parents, fall in and out of love, come to terms with their sexualities, straight or gay, require occasional medical and therapeutic help, have their moments of happiness and despair. So far, so normal.

But encroaching on their everyday lives is a sequence of increasingly weird and sinister supernatural events, the details of which are conveyed to the reader in Ness’s italicised chapter headings. Literary mischief is the name of the game here, as we witness the canon of young-adult literature fiction – or a certain kind of young-adult fiction – being ransacked to provide a delicious subversion of the genre. It is all very clever, very original and very Patrick Ness, right down to the inclusion among the cast of a cat called Mary Magdalene.

To write a young-adult novel featuring 16-year-old conjoined twins might be considered a sufficiently demanding challenge; add the decision to do so entirely in verse and the challenge, one might think, becomes insurmountable. All the more credit, then, to Sarah Crossan’s One (Bloomsbury, £10.99) for confronting both challenges in a novel that is truly remarkable in both subject matter and style.

Set in contemporary New England and focusing on the story of Grace and Tippi, the novel traces the twins’ progress from protective home-schooled environment to a wider world and its varied responses to their particular form of “difference”. Grace, the narrator, remarks at one point, “People don’t understand / our synchronicity, / the quiet connection / that flows between us”, and it is Crossan’s carefully crafted depiction of this “quiet connection” that gives her novel its blend, at times quite heartbreaking, of intensity, sensitivity and humour. Pity, as Grace observes with typical candour, “is not part of the game”.

The cadences and the arresting images of Crossan’s verse – “A shooting star glitters across the slate-coloured / sky” – are an integral part of Grace’s narrative, establishing and maintaining its claims to be, in its final words, “an epitaph to love”.

Readers familiar with the upper reaches of Rathmines Road in Dublin will derive an extra pleasure from Maureen White’s impressive debut novel, The Butterfly Shell (O’Brien Press, €8.99), given the accuracy with which it depicts the area. (“The traffic is mental there, you have to run even when the light is green for crossing.”) As the story evolves it becomes clear that her powers of observation and perception are not limited to mere topographical matters. Her insights into the complexities of young female friendships and rivalries, and of how both are affected by home and school environments, are conveyed with sharpness and precision.

Her heroine, a 13-year-old Dubliner named Marie, is on holiday with her cousins in Connemara; she takes the opportunity to review, in a diary format, her first year at St Bridget’s, her all-girls secondary school back in Rathmines. Here, she has been subjected to a particularly obnoxious form of bullying by a gang of her classmates, who designate themselves the Super Six. Led by Rachel, their ingenuity in devising ways of making Marie’s life miserable knows few limits. At the same time her sleep is being broken by a series of nightmares dominated by the ghostly sounds of a baby’s cries.

White’s nuanced weaving of these two strands of her novel is one of its greatest strengths, all the more striking for not resorting to the melodrama or sensationalism that we might have expected in a narrative that details a young girl’s experimentation with self-harm, more especially with cutting. The overall delicacy of her approach matches that of the abalone shell that gives her novel its title.

Maureen White will be one of the speakers at this year’s Children’s Books Ireland conference, Conceal and Reveal: Truth and Lies in Children’s Books, to be held at the Light House Cinema, in Dublin, on September 12th and 13th. Other speakers include James Dawson, Kieran Fanning, Kim Hood, Louise O’Neill, Annabel Pitcher and Pádraic Whyte. Booking details at childrensbooksireland.ie

Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s books