Robert DunbarThere is a moment in Jaclyn Moriarty's Becoming Bindy Mackenzie when a schoolteacher called Try delivers her views on the "three main characteristics" of teenagers.
They, she argues, are people given to too much introspection, to cravings for excitement and to losing their sense of perspective. Unfair as it may seem as a generalisation about the teenagers we once were ourselves or those whom we now observe around us, it has undoubtedly very considerable truth when applied to the fictional variety, including many of those we encounter in the books reviewed here.
Set in contemporary Australia, Moriarty's novel has at its centre a teenage girl called Bindy, precociously bright, highly articulate - and scarily introspective. She is not, however, the most popular student at Ashbury High School, a fact which comes to her notice when a new self-awareness course in "Friendship And Development" (FAD) is added to the curriculum. The repercussions of Bindy's awareness of her true standing in the school community provide Moriarty with the opportunity to probe, very entertainingly and often very sharply, the nature of school friendships and rivalries; additionally, they allow for some wonderfully satirical swipes at certain developments, or fads, in teaching methodologies. In terms of form, the novel veers towards the experimental mode, favouring a collage structure which encompasses, inter alia, straightforward diary narrative, e-mails and Power Point presentation text. It is all very clever, quite bizarre in places and, after almost 500 pages, concludes with a delightfully knowing single sentence.
The kinds of discrepancy between outward appearances and inner realities which typify Bindy's school and social lives also dominate the story of Emily in Joanna Kenrick's Red Tears. Academically successful and apparently surrounded by a caring family and loyal friends, she can still reflect, as she reaches 16, that she is "old and tired . . . and sick of it all". Her chosen method of release from her sense of being under constant pressure is self-harming, or cutting, which, according to recent statistics, is an increasing practice among today's adolescents. As a fictional subject it could easily lend itself to sensationalism, but here it is sympathetically and indeed courageously handled, though some moments which focus on cutting procedures and paraphernalia will undoubtedly be distressing for some readers.
Lynda Waterhouse's Cut Off deals with themes similar to Kenrick's novel, but their treatment as a work of fiction, while still sympathetic, does not quite leave such a strong impression. Here again we have a teenage girl - Vix - who reacts against familial and academic pressures by savouring "the tingle/ Of doing a forbidden thing/ And the relief of being/ Out of yourself for a while". These urges are conveyed to us in a form of free verse which combines naivete and vulnerability, juxtaposed with the thoughts of Ava, the much more down-to-earth sister from whom, in various senses, Vix is "cut off". There are some well-observed insights into the possible downsides of having "cash-rich/time-poor" parents and, certainly, of attending "high-achieving girls' schools"; but, on the whole, the novel fails to rise beyond its issues-driven agenda.
Cutting features also, though only as an incidental detail, in Tabitha Suzuma's From Where I Stand, a teenage novel most easily characterised as a psychological thriller. Its hero, Raven, a gloomily withdrawn young man, claims to have detailed knowledge of the precise circumstances of his mother's death, following which he has been put in foster care and sent to a new school where - in some of the most convincing scenes of the novel - he is mercilessly bullied. His declared determination to establish the "truth" of his mother's death (or was it murder?) serves as the principal driving force of the story and leads to some complex twists in the unravelling of the plot, not all of which may come as a complete surprise to the reader.
After four novels in which the emphasis has largely been on the darker sides of teenage life it is something of a relief to arrive at Claire Hennessy's That Girl, in which the only serious concerns have to do with its heroine's 16th birthday, its celebratory party and its consequences. There is not a great deal of action or drama but Kim emerges from this important milestone convinced of her happiness, a state of mind she can "definitely live with". On the way to this realisation, she has come to new understandings of her mother, her step-father, her brother (a subtly sketched portrait of an over-anxious Leaving Cert student), her boyfriend - and Michael, a long-time acquaintance whom she may, perhaps, be seeing from now on in a new light. Fresh, chatty and undemanding, this should find a place in all girly beach bags this summer.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and readingTeenage Fiction
Becoming Bindy Mackenzie By Jaclyn Moriarty Young Picador, 483pp. £5.99 Red Tears By Joanna Kenrick Faber & Faber, 263pp. £6.99 Cut Off By Lynda Waterhouse Piccadilly Press, 195pp. £6.99 From Where I Stand By Tabitha Suzuma Bodley Head, 245pp. £8.99 That Girl By Claire Hennessy Poolbeg, 216pp. €7.99