TEENAGE FICTION:Once one is finished, the others will follow, writes Niall MacMonagle.
'YOUNGSTERS DON'T read as much as they used to." So said Aristotle; so said Shakespeare's teacher; so say concerned parents everywhere, I bet. But get them into libraries, into bookshops, get them into books. One thing's sure: books have never been easier to access or cheaper and it only takes one book to do the trick. Then another and another and another will follow.
Helena Pielichaty's Accidental Friends(Oxford, £5.99) tells of how Emma, James, Grace and Leon, from different racial and social backgrounds, meet at college and become friends, and the consequences of this. The interweaving storylines reveal themselves through a somewhat staged discussion of four paintings, and what could be merely sensational - 16-year-old Emma's pregnancy, James's gay dad, Leon's ankle tagging - is rescued by fine earthy writing, lingo and insights: "It's not a crime to be gay. It's just something you are, like being musical or left-handed", or "Hindsight sucked". Sex, blackmail, and a shocking accident ensure you'll read to the end and Pielichaty's characters discover that "just because you make mistakes it doesn't mean you're rubbish".
Sunshine to the Sunless, by Gareth Thompson (Definitions, £5.99), opens dramatically, brilliantly, Ian McEwanishly. Nine-year-old Andy Kindness helplessly watches a father and son die in quicksand. Six years on, Andy, in smalltown Cumbria, is still haunted. Thompson's fiction is stranger than life: daffodil breeding, girl crushes, alternative parents, drug dealing, a cancer scare, aphrodisiacs, a poetry happening, sexual urges, irresponsible adults, a heavy metal gig, a Buddhist Priory, another quicksand drama and a car crash mean improbabilities, inconsistencies, contrivances. The mix is too much but that familiar tale of the teenager searching for self still holds its reader.
Girls will love the readable, shiny, new Jacqueline Wilson, My Sister Jodie(Doubleday £12.99) with trademark Nick Sharratt drawings. Wilson expertly creates a social dynamic and characters grappling with changing situations. Sisters, obedient Pearl and bad-girl Jodie, new to boarding school, discover role reversal when Pearl, the younger, finds herself playing the protective one. Wilson has never shirked dark and difficult themes but she manages to engage, entertain and challenge all at once. Fireworks are the backdrop to a shocking and heart-rending accident, followed by a hopeful but sorrowful close.
Reluctant girl readers can't go wrong with Jacqueline Wilson, and for 11- 14-year-old boys there's Joe Craig, named a Boys into Books author by the British department of education. Sabotage(HarperCollins, £5.99) is the fourth Jimmy Coates adventure and, like Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider or James Bond, Jimmy is an adventurer. Genetically engineered, Jimmy is 38 per cent human with in-built night-vision and designed to grow into a killer. The tension within Jimmy is to resist such impulses: "day by day the assassin instincts in his DNA took over more of his mind, subduing his human voice". And this is only part of the drama. Side streets, back alleys, London, New York, Texas, Reykjavik, poisonous Greenland sharks, a plot to kill the British prime minister, a plane in tailspin and a secret missile base posing as an oil rig are all part of the picture. "Brilliant" is the verdict from 13-year-old boys. Easy to see why. A gobble of a read.
Sally Nicholls's Ways to Live Forever(Marion Lloyd, £7.99) asks that unanswerable question "Why does God make kids get ill?" In 70 short chapters, 11-year-old Sam tells of his final months with terminal leukaemia. Only 23 when she wrote this, Nicholls steers clear of sentimentality and the deliberate plucking of heart strings. This is an excellent and moving work. "Going to die is the biggest waffly thing of all" writes Sam and he and Felix, both ill and home schooled, have bright, inquisitive, humorous minds: "Mum and Dad are good at being scared and quiet". This portrait of a family in slow crisis becomes Sam's own book and not "a weepy book full of poems and pictures of rainbows". Lists and questions become a vital literary device, the descriptions of gathering relatives are totally convincing and the ending would touch the coldest heart. Beautifully done.
Jenny Valentine's Broken Soup(HarperCollins, £5.99) is Rowan's story. She lives with her mother and sister in a house that has become a shrine to her dead older brother, Jack; his room is now "the saddest place in the house, the living breathing mother ship of everyone's grief". A negative given to Rowan by a boy called Harper Greene who lives in an ambulance (go figure!) develops into a plot that explores adolescent hopes and hassles, alternative living, free and easy spirits. Teenage fiction can have an earnest and off-putting whiff to it. Not this. Valentine skilfully evokes a deep sadness, "all absence and sorrow and skin and bone". When Rowan meets Bee the mystery begins to unfold. Too many coincidences is my one quibble and I guessed the ending, but it's a memorable, entertaining story nonetheless.
The Heritage, by Will Ashon (Faber and Faber, £12.99), is a disturbing, sophisticated and brilliant novel. With Dickensian brio, Ashon creates characters, handles plot effectively and writes so well that his readers will be older teenagers and adults. Tilly and Sadie, from very different backgrounds, meet at an offenders institute. Once released they share a bedsit, a life of shoplifting, alcopops, spliffs, and CCTV. "We all want to be heroes," says Tilly, "and none of us ever come very close." The book is set in the near future and government policy dictates that swabs of DNA are taken to find a criminality gene, but Tilly switches the swabs and the rest is not history. Ashon explores bad-girl syndrome in an alien, controlling environment and the girls' search for the truth leads us on a twisting, turning, riveting journey of grubby sex, criminality, sperm clinics and grim discovery. This is fresh, serious, explicit, unsettling fiction for those aged 16-plus.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin. A Leaving Cert poetry anthology, Poetry Now 2010, which he edited, has just been published by the Celtic Press