TEENAGE FICTION:These teenage novels court familiar themes but don't disappoint, writes Richard Dunbar
THE CONTINUING status of Judy Blume's 1975 teenage novel Forever as one of the key texts in the history of the genre has been commented on before in these columns. And now here it comes again, this time casting its very considerable shadow over Tanya Lee Stone's A Bad Boy Can Be Good For a Girl (Quercus, £5.99). Three American high school teenagers - Josie, Nicolette and Aviva - take it in turn to record their experiences with, and their responses to, the physical charms of a "bad" boy who, as Josie expresses it, is "only out for one thing".
This verdict she inscribes in the school library copy of Forever, hoping thereby that, for future readers, it will be a case of "Forewarned is Forearmed".
Interestingly presented as a sequence of chatty verse monologues and with a generous measure of sexual candour, Stone's novel will be especially popular with those adolescent girls who delight in exchanging confidences with one another about the wickedly manipulative ways of their male contemporaries.
Another trio of teenage girls - Emily, Florence and Sienna on this occasion - figures in Julia Clarke's The Kissing Club (Oxford, £5.99), but here the principal focus is on Emily, the narrator, who at 17 now finds herself pregnant - and all in spite of having taken, three years previously, a chastity oath. While many readers will have identified the "conceited, over-sexed tom cat" (Flo's description) responsible rather earlier than is actually made clear, Clarke cleverly maintains the reader's interest by concentrating less on the circumstances of the child's conception than on its consequences, whether on Emily herself, her friends or her parents. Rather as with his "tom cat" counterpart in Stone's novel, the young man here is more caricature than character - but the girls are an endearing mixture of naivety and credibility.
First published in 1999 and now reissued in handsome hardback format, Linda Newbery's Flightsend (David Fickling, £10.99) touches emotional depths rarely reached in more self-consciously "contemporary" teenage fiction. In essence, this is a novel of a mother (Kathy) and her 16-year-old daughter (Charlie), recently moved to a new house and attempting to start - amid the usual upheavals - a new life. "I've been sensible and mature for Mum," reflects Charlie towards the end of her story. "Now I want something for myself." In the context of the narrative it is both a fair self-appraisal and a reasonable demand, given particularly that she has had to disentangle her feelings for Sean, a teacher at her school, from those her mother has earlier held for him. This is "teenage fiction" at its most accomplished: thoughtful, exquisitely written and - at times - achingly sad.
The various degrees of realism favoured by Stone, Clarke and Newbery give way, in Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (Walker, £12.99), to fantasy, in a novel which from its opening page makes powerful claims on the reader's attention. (And, incidentally, on this same opening page introduces Manchee, easily the most engaging talking canine to enter the great doggy kennel of children's literature for some time). At its centre is a coming of age story, set in an all-male extra-terrestrial society known as "New World", where "13 is the day you start getting real responsibilities". The atmosphere of this domain is polluted by the "Noise" of the inhabitants' innermost thoughts, all of these audible to all and sundry, animals included.
When our young hero, Todd, just about to get "real responsibilities", begins to penetrate the mysteries of the "Noise", the stage is set for a vigorously paced narrative of increasingly dramatic encounters, victories and defeats, some of them extremely chilling. There are several very violent moments, but these are lightened when Todd finds himself joined on his mission by another human companion, of a kind he had not thought even existed; their relationship, sandwiched between the picaresque personages met along the way, allows for some diverting humour. Ness's style at one moment favours the knife-like staccato effect of the monosyllabic sentence, at another an unpunctuated paragraph-long stream of consciousness. There are times when the overall title of his projected trilogy - "Chaos Walking" - seems really apt, but the persevering reader will ultimately be rewarded by this highly original contribution to dystopian fiction.
For readers who prefer their originality and their chills in smaller doses, the 10 short stories in Margo Lanagan's superb Red Spikes (David Fickling, £10.99) should prove a wonderful treat. Try - if you are very brave - her re-working in Winkie of the traditional nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie and you may well think twice before reciting it to the next child you are hoping to lull to sleep. Or, if you think there is nothing new to imagine about school bullying stories, try Hero Vale. Quirky, inventive and occasionally dark and disturbing, these short stories leave an impression which many longer narratives should envy.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading