Eighteen-year-old Finlay “has spent his whole life on the edge of human contact”. Having recently aged out of the care system, he’s just begun a nursing degree and – for the first time in years – has a bedroom of his own. Getting to university is something he’s fought for, but thriving there proves more difficult, particularly as he juggles a demanding course with part-time work. Small details – “Finlay starts scribbling amid the roar of pressed keys” – remind us of his difference, without the point being hammered home.
Seventeen-year-old Banjo is still in the system, living with a couple who are “so nice it scares him. It makes him soft, want to be soft, but he’ll never survive if he is… He used to know how to shove things down and lock them away. But now he carries it everywhere: this rancid regret that bloats inside his gut and swells it raw.” As the two boys adjust to their new lives, flashbacks to three years earlier reveal that they were once friends in the same group home; the pacing, building up to a reunion, is exquisite.
Glasgow Boys (Faber, £8.99) is the debut from Scottish author Margaret McDonald, and the kind of first novel critics tend to use the word “assured” about – code for “This is far better than any first book has any right to be. It is brilliant, and I am insanely jealous of this writer’s talent.” What impressed me the most about this moving story, aside from its incredibly deft handling of a wide range of “issues” (ethnicity, sexuality, class, illness, addiction), was its tenderness, a carefully controlled tenderness that creeps right up to the edge of sentimentality but never falls off the edge. Both Banjo and Finlay find people who care about them – love interests among them – but the hopeful ending is very much hard-won. Every emotional moment feels earned; every silver lining counted has the ring of authenticity to it. An utterly beautiful read.
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“I just thought an escaped ghost would want to do something creepier.” / “You clearly haven’t been hit on by men in a bar.” The banter is strong in the second instalment of Amy Clarkin’s PSI (Paranormal Surveyance Ireland) novel, Who Watches This Place (O’Brien Press, €12.99). The late-teen and early-twentysomething ghosthunters are still recovering from the events of the first book, with the passionately scientific Davis more determined than ever to gather data that can’t be argued with, and terminally avoidant Raven reluctant to hone her newly discovered psychic gifts. A new case arrives, as does a complication in the form of a young journalist determined to expose PSI as charlatans. When one of their own is taken prisoner by a dark force, the gang must team up to save them.
This is a story with plenty of supernatural elements, including a chilling haunted portrait, but ultimately it’s an ode to friendship, a cosy hug of a book that celebrates found family and relationships of all kinds. In this volume, the one beating this drum most clearly is Fionn, whose coming-out as asexual is handled delicately and movingly. Fionn already knows that he doesn’t want to find romantic love, that his life will not look like how others expect it to, and it’s heartbreaking when his attempts to maintain long-standing friendships in the face of other people’s new romances are met with assurances that he’ll meet someone, that it will happen for him. What he wants – needs – from his friends is to be reassured that “he wasn’t broken”, and that their platonic love matters. And it does, because Clarkin has built a world in which friendship can literally save the day. This is the kind of book that will make so many readers feel seen and comforted and hopeful.
Both of the above titles are of the sort that would be on the “challenged” list in the tiny town of Bayberry, where Noor Khan moves in her final year of high school. American writer Samira Ahmed, who has previously written brilliantly about her country’s treatment of Muslims, tackles censorship head-on in her latest novel, This Book Won’t Burn (Atom, £9.99). Noor doesn’t mean to cause trouble as the new girl in school, but as a reader – and (a shrewd move on Ahmed’s part here) someone looking for a fight to distract herself from the grief over her father abandoning the family – she’s outraged by the “challenges” brought against books in her new school.
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“A parent finds some tiny thing offensive and they get the book pulled so no one can read it,” her new friend reflects, echoing the very real policies playing out in American schools at present. Fighting back against the absurd “challenges” gives Noor a purpose but then turns her into public enemy number one when the school retaliates. “These are formative years,” her principal intones, “and we cannot let their impressionable young minds be shaped by the pornographic and the profane, by so-called young adult novels that are merely doorways to delinquency.”
This is not a perfect book by any means; there’s a lack of nuance that can make this feel more like a polemic than fiction, and it’s particularly striking given that there are recent middle-grade titles about book banning (David Levithan’s Answers In The Pages, Amy Sarig King’s Attack of the Black Rectangles) that have handled this so deftly. Every single villain here is cartoonishly evil – certainly most of them being like this would be understandable, given their real-life inspirations, but all of them? There are few character surprises in store; we know exactly who the “good” guys are from the beginning and this never wavers.
And yet. This is a book about how “a book could be a portal to different worlds, a time machine, a rocket ship, a source of comfort”. It’s a book with a good librarian and a student-led campaign that leads to a confrontation at a school board meeting, with anger that may not always be palatable but certainly is justified, with recommendations of other YA novels woven throughout it. It was inevitable that it would win me over, and I am extremely glad it’s in the world.
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“You can just not look,” Eden’s mother tells her when everyone at school is terrorising her online, in Rebecca Westcott’s Like A Girl (Scholastic, £8.99). This well-intentioned but dismissive response prompts a glorious internal monologue from the narrator: “She has no idea. She has zero knowledge that she has just said the single most insane thing that I’ve ever heard. She has no clue that the words she’s just spoken have made me feel more alone and untethered than ever.”
This book is a superb exploration of teenage bullying, resisting easy answers and in particular knocking back the idea that “online” and “real life” are two distinct universes for anyone in this day and age. Put it in every school library.
The impact of social media is also explored in Sam Blake’s Something’s About To Blow Up (Gill Books, £11.99), the second in her mystery series, as three girls try to figure out who placed a bomb in the science lab. While the characterisation is at times a little clunky, the internet parlance rings true.
