Books

Young adult fiction round-up: Holly Jackson’s gripping crime thriller

Plus great reads from Mary HK Choi, Erin Stewart and Jenny Downham

Holly Jackson

Claire Hennessy's face
Claire Hennessy
Sat Nov 23 2019 - 06:00

It’s amazing what fictional teenagers get to do for their school projects. In Holly Jackson’s debut Young Adult crime thriller, A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder (Electric Monkey, £7.99), Pippa’s final year of school includes delving into a local murder case from five years ago as part of her A-level coursework. Persuaded that the boy blamed for it, who shortly took his own life, is really innocent, she interviews everyone connected with the case, and uncovers a tangled web of dark secrets in the process. If the initial premise, and Pippa’s interest in the case, is a little flimsy, it’s forgivable as we read on and become gripped by this tightly-plotted account of a small town where far too many people have something to hide.

For Pablo, narrator of Mary HK Choi's Permanent Record (Atom, £7.99), education doesn't offer quite so many delightful opportunities; student loans and seemingly harmless credit cards have instead caused him to drop out of college. We meet him when he's working in a New York health food store, the kind that sells "every type of rich-people fetish food". Late one night, in walks a pop star, a girl famous since she was a child, and a flirtation, then relationship, begins.

It sounds like a dream-come-true, but Choi depicts the uneasy consequences of being involved with someone famous with shrewd insight. There’s an “intimacy contract” to be signed: “Nothing like the promise of being slapped with a civil suit for damages to entice you to want to make a move on a lady who also happens to be a multinational conglomerate.” That this is not a wish-fulfilment tale is its strength; it takes an implausible scenario and transforms it into a completely believable, layered story about being young, broke and in love in the age of social media.

“One year after the fire, my doctor removes my mask and tells me to get a life.” Sixteen-year-old Ava is the sole survivor of the house fire that killed her parents and cousin, and has been left not only with painful memories but with 60 per cent of her body covered in burns. She knows she should be grateful to be alive – “I can’t compete with tombstones. Death trumps suffering every time” – but the prospect of returning to school with her scars and deformities, including a toe transplanted onto her hand to replace a thumb, is horrific.

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Erin Stewart's Scars Like Wings (Simon & Schuster, £12.99), delivers a message of hope and resilience for anyone overcoming a tough time, but its understanding of the complexity of adolescent relationships – and the space for both great cruelty and great kindness within them – makes it first and foremost a compelling and moving story.

A new title from Jenny Downham (Before I Die) is always a treat. Her latest, Furious Thing (David Fickling Books, £12.99) introduces us to the often-angry Lexi, whose temper is getting out of hand. Her soon-to-be-stepfather laments that she's "become inattentive and impulsive, you're often very challenging. What if these behaviours prevent you from ever holding down a job or maintaining a relationship? … I know it's not easy to hear, but won't you feel relieved to have a diagnosis?"

Like so many women writers before her, Downham invites us to consider whether there’s something truly “wrong” with Lexi or whether her world is slightly askew – whether or not “a healthy girl should be furious, because it’s an unfair world.” Her portrayal of an emotionally abusive man (in the form of the almost-stepfather, just in case the above quote wasn’t a huge red flag for you) is unsettlingly authentic. The toll of constantly walking on eggshells around someone in the home – a person whose approval and love you desperately seek, and who offers it just infrequently enough for you to never give up - seeps out of the pages. My heart emerged a little bruised from this novel, but tremendously impressed with Downham’s talent. Along with the other titles listed, it’s absolutely a “best of 2019” pick.

Best of 2019

It's been an incredible year for Irish YA titles, with debut author Alvy Carragher (The Cantankerous Molly Darling) establishing herself as a writer to watch, and Sarah Carroll impressing us once more with The Words That Fly Between Us, in which her protagonist battles bullies from schoolgirls to property developers. This country's toxic past and shameful treatment of women is explored deftly in Moira Fowley Doyle's magical realist All The Bad Apples, while Deirdre Sullivan offers up a stunning dark fantasy novel with Perfectly Preventable Deaths. And our current Laureate na nÓg, Sarah Crossan, packs a devastating emotional punch with Toffee, a novel told through free verse about a girl running away from an abusive home.

Standout titles from the UK include Brian Conaghan's The M Word, Yasmin Rahman's All The Things We Never Said, and Sara Barnard's Fierce Fragile Hearts, all of which explore female friendship and mental health issues. William Sutcliffe's The Gifted, The Talented, and Me is an utterly hilarious and sharp take on the "we're all special" rhetoric, and no list would be complete without Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth and his return to the world of Lyra Silvertongue.

Among the best American offerings this year are Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful verse memoir, Shout, and Samira Ahmed's increasingly-prescient Internment, depicting American detention camps in an alarmingly plausible near-future. Angie Thomas (On The Come Up) and Randy Ribay (Patron Saints of Nothing) dive into racial and cultural identity with tremendous skill, while the boundaries of reality are compellingly blurred in Alyssa Sheinmel's psychological thriller A Danger To Herself and Others and AS King's surrealist Dig. Add them all to the Christmas lists.