There is a sense in which the title of Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur: At the Crossing-Places (Orion, £10.99 in UK) has a general application to a great deal of "young adult" fiction. This is a genre, as represented in the novels reviewed here, where adolescent protagonists are frequently depicted as trapped between a world of security and protection and one which, while offering the invigorating challenge of the unknown, comes with snares and disappointed dreams.
This duality is well caught at a moment in Crossley-Holland's novel when its young 13th century-hero, Arthur de Caldicot, reflects on the magical seeing stone which sends him pictures of the stories of his royal namesake. These pictures, he records, sometimes seem "like a promise, sometimes like a warning." On a quest which sees him shift between these states of anticipation and admonition, Arthur passes through the various ritual stages by which he eventually becomes a knight; his progress is fascinatingly mirrored in the romance, infidelity and treachery revealed in the seeing stone. The colourful and complex trappings of medieval aristocratic life are a rich background for a boy's search for the truth - about his parents, about the nature of love and, ultimately, about himself.
Almost exactly the same summary (omitting the medieval setting) can be offered of Elizabeth Laird's Jake's Tower (Macmillan, £9.99 in UK). This strongly contemporary novel focuses on the "tower", the "dream house", which Jake, a young teenager, plans in his imagination for himself by way of escape from the harshness of his real environment. Subjected to violent physical abuse by his stepfather, the boy yearns for a meeting with the father whom he has never known, the father who, aged 16, had walked out the day his son was born. A reunion, in one of the book's most telling scenes, eventually occurs. But, rather than being the long-awaited realisation of a dream, it serves merely as an initiation into increasingly adult complexities.
A further reunion between teenage child and father serves as starting point for Berlie Doherty's Holly Starcross (Hamish Hamilton, £10.99 in UK), but here the child is a daughter and it is the father who arranges the meeting. Holly's mother, eight years ago, had deserted her husband, found a new partner and now has a second family where, at least on the surface, Holly seems reasonably secure. But, with the unexpected reappearance of her father and, in his words, "eight years to make up", Holly is poignantly caught between past memories and future possibilities. Doherty's grasp of the strengths and weaknesses, the confidence and the vulnerability, of adolescence and adulthood, is, as always, beautifully and convincingly balanced.
The need for a teenage daughter to reconsider her relationship with her father lies also at the centre of Joan Lingard's Me and My Shadow (Puffin, £4.99 in UK). In this case, the need arises when Emily discovers that she is being stalked by another young woman, who in time will reveal that Emily's father, as a result of an extra-marital affair, is her father also. Consequently, the orderliness and safe predictability of Emily's comfortable Edinburgh existence are shattered. It is, as she puts it, "like finding a twin, a mirror image of myself, but one that I did not want." In tracing Emily's accommodation to these new discoveries, Lingard successfully penetrates the surface calm of family life to expose its underlying darker shadows.
Dark shadows abound in Enid Richemond's For Maritsa, with Love (Simon & Schuster, £7.99 in UK), not least those which characterise its setting, the murky underworld of the Paris metro. Here, a group of young gypsies makes a livelihood by begging, until their routine is broken when one of them, Maritsa, decides to pursue her dreams of wealth and fame. In the process, she is to have a number of encounters which will reveal the emptiness, indeed the danger, of many of her aspirations, particularly where questions of her growing sexuality are concerned. This novel, while highly atmospheric and engagingly readable, delivers rather less than it promises, a feature which it seems to share with most fictional adolescent dreams.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin