“The truth is that the whole world rested on a single bee’s wings. The whole world.” Acclaimed Welsh writer Caryl Lewis wastes no time getting to the point of her latest novel, The Danger of Small Things (Simon & Schuster, £16.99); we learn about the extinction of honeybees on the very first page. Lewis, a beekeeper herself, includes an author’s note providing context for those who may not be aware: “The bees are struggling. For many years now, they have been surviving rather than thriving, and as the canary in the mine, they are trying to tell us that the state of the natural world is precarious.”
One suspects younger readers are already aware – from both the news and internet memes involving Barry B Benson – of how vital bees are to our fragile ecosystem, but the difficulty is in knowing what to do about it, how to push back against a seemingly inevitable collapse. Lewis argues that “humanity’s greatest weapon with which to tackle the climate emergency is the imagination; we have to make space for creative thinking, and we have to act if we are to succeed. The arts are a powerful way to communicate the urgency of the situation while leading with kindness and compassion”.
This reader agrees firmly, but it can be tricky to strike the right balance between dramatising threats and lecturing an audience. There are some moments where 14-year-old Jess’s reflections on the world before feel like finger wagging: “I wonder whether people did actually love it? To live like that. Or if they thought that there was something better? Something shinier? Something more, and in their looking for it, they destroyed what they had.”
Today’s teenagers certainly have more choice than Jess and her peers, exploited both for manual labour and their reproductive capacity, but the floaty, bohemian existence imagined as the norm is available to very few – in the same way, perhaps, that those fond of costume dramas tend to imagine living in the past as a rich person, rather than as a servant.
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It’s difficult for dystopian fiction, inherently a political genre, not to have flashes of didacticism, though. Lewis creates a compelling and claustrophobic world for her heroine to rebel against, but also understands the difficulty of maintaining hope and principles when desperate. The result is a story that is moving without veering into sentimentality, a novel that ultimately succeeds in feeling urgent but also beautiful.
The value of the arts on a more personal level informs Méabh Collins’s second novel, From the Top, Sally Flynn (O’Brien, €9.99), in which the titular character craves a “bright Broadway future” but is also hiding grief when she begins penning a musical about a lonely frog missing her mother. Some may call Sally Flynn “intense”, but she insists she’s “passionate” – a true theatre kid, dramatic on and off the stage (“I could have had an agent by now, but I’m washed up!” she laments, aged 14). In lesser hands Sally would be a punchline; here we get a more nuanced perspective on the arts as both “a wonderful outlet for expressing our emotions”, as a kind teacher says, and a highly competitive, often dysfunctional industry.
Sally, defying gravity and not throwing away her shot, is a delight, but so too are the Dublin-specific references throughout – the BGE theatre as a “grand ship on the ocean”, her former-broadcaster granny’s resentment at missing out on being “the voice of the Luas”, the “generous voluntary contribution” parents are hounded for annually. There’s care taken with each of the supporting characters – including one of my favourites, a male friend who eye-rolls over Sally’s musical until he finds a way to connect it to his own Greek mythology obsession – and a warm, uplifting ending. Brava!
[ Dragons, drowned worlds, different realities: March’s YA fiction picksOpens in new window ]
A more supernatural Dublin appears in the latest Skulduggery Pleasant title, with Derek Landy now on the 18th full-length volume in the bestselling series about a sharp-witted, sharply dressed skeleton detective. A Soul Full of Shadows (HarperCollins, £14.99) features a large cast of characters with Dickensian names – Chorus Wild, Omen Darkly, Consolation Grum, Winter Grieving, Tenacity Yates – and Landy’s familiar Hiberno-English banter (“anyone who calls themselves Difficult has got to be a spanner”).
Despite occasional lines of dialogue that feel – sometimes deliberately, one suspects – a little too cheesy (“It’s so good to see you when you’re not bleeding to death”), this is an engaging, fast-paced fantasy thriller for existing fans, many of whom grew up with Valkyrie Cain and will cheer on her next big step.
Head north on this island for another darkly magical city; the Belfast of Stephen Daly’s debut The Last Death Poet (Rock the Boat, £8.99) is literally haunted by its violent past. For 17-year-old Michael, Ireland has always been the place his parents ran away from, but now he and his mum are back, and he’s started to see strange visions – of soldiers, of abandoned babies, of the Titanic. The memories of them quickly fade, unless he captures the image on camera.
His new friend Meg is on hand to provide helpful exposition when needed, sometimes about the older generation (“They grew up before the ceasefire ... Everyone their age is, like, deeply traumatised, and thanks to intergenerational trauma we are too”) and sometimes about Irish mythology (“The Tuatha Dé Danann are essentially the ancient gods of Ireland ... One of the most powerful of them all is the goddess of death and war, the Morrigan”). Perhaps it’s a little too convenient, but she causes some serious havoc later, so we’ll forgive it.
This is a smart, sophisticated exploration of the legacy of the Troubles, with its supernatural elements made believable via a healthy dose of scepticism (“this isn’t some sort of enchanted phone? Did you steal it from a dragon’s hoard or outwit a sphinx?” Meg wonders) and hormonal yearning (“I can’t get distracted by a dumb crush on another only potentially bi-curious, tanned, flirtatious, funny and totally hot walking emotional tsunami,” Michael reflects, before inevitably doing just that).
Here, too, the importance of the arts is affirmed: Michael learns that the “death poets”, of which he is now one, have a duty to tell the “invisible stories”, the “thousands of untold stories rising from the earth”. This storytelling is how we make sense of the world, Daly tells us; it is how we stay human.
“What is the stars?” Sean O’Casey’s characters wondered. Giant balls of gas as metaphors for human fate have a long-standing tradition in literature (see Shakespeare V Green on whether fault lies with ourselves or in our stars). For 17-year-old Celeste, constellations are a possible map to her missing friend, the star she orbits around.
Nicky disappears the same day “the Big One” hits San Francisco, and is presumed dead in a city “smashed back to Victorian times”. Celeste, however, uncovers his plan to run away, and is convinced he’s alive.
Susie Nadler’s Lies We Tell About The Stars (Penguin, £9.99) is a thoughtful, lyrical reminder that “the sureness of the planet under your feet is one of those things you take for granted until it’s gone”. Nadler deftly scatters the astronomy-related metaphors throughout this luminous account of a girl stepping into a future of her own making.
