The explosive in-between years of teenagehood have most famously been served in English literature by Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers. Baz Luhrmann's noisy cinematic realisation of Shakespeare's doomed couple seized on this aspect of the play - teenage crisis - with all the blossoming beauty and outrageous mood swings of that time of life.
"Coming of age" novels abounded in the second half of the 20th century. Roddy Doyle's skill at the genre won him the Booker for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Salinger gave us Holden Caulfield's struggle with burgeoning adult life in Catcher in the Rye. And there was Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, which encapsulates the teenage dilemma, "Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me. This much I understand now. But the man can give no help to the boy. . ."
The trouble with suggesting these novels for teenagers is that they can be more likely to appeal to adults looking back on those transitional years with nostalgia and experience, than to kids in the midst of them, seeking certainties and directions. Teen fiction is a difficult genre to embrace, as difficult as making conversation with a strange pubescent who might land in your house and be as communicative as British comedian Harry Enfield's notorious Kevin.
One of the major challenges of teen fiction is keeping the readers engaged while providing a bridge to the darker territories of adult fiction.
Twelve or 13-year-olds who are keen readers are likely to be enjoying the Animorphs series (K.A. Applegate, Scholastic, £3.99 in UK), in which teenage heroes have the power to change into animals and birds (in good causes of course). These eerie science fiction themes are popular, and carried over in a couple of new releases for the summer.
The highest profile will be The Wind Singer (Mammoth, hardback £12.99 in UK) by William Nicholson, who has an impressive list of films and plays to his credit. These include Shadowlands, the story of C.S. Lewis, Map of the Heart, and Nell. The book is futuristic, magical and encapsulates the teenage rebel crisis. It is set in the future, in a totalitarian state.
There are echoes of both The Hobbit and 1984 here. A family called Hath are somewhere near the bottom of a hyper-achievement-oriented society. The rebellious daughter, Kestrel, gets in big trouble with the authorities, and faced with a lifetime effectively being lobotomised, escapes and comes across the nominal emperor of the state, a prisoner in his tower. Although wedded more to eating chocolate buttons than liberating his people, the emperor gives the girl the instruction she needs to free them all from the tyranny of an exam-based system - no doubt a people-pleaser for Nicholson's target audience.
Supernatural spookiness also pervades the Hex series. Hex: Ghosts (Macmillan, circa £9.99 in UK) is the third in a series by young British writer Rhiannon Lassiter, whose mother, Mary Hoffman, writes children's books. The premise is that certain individuals have a gene which links them into the computer network, and because of this access they are enemies of the state (again).
Raspberries on the Yangtze (Simon & Schuster, £7.99 in UK) has a delicious title, a beautiful jacket, and a highly likeable story and style. Karen Wallace, the author, has based it on her childhood in rural Canada. It is simple and comforting, for the child in the teenager, but deals with absorbing issues such as sex and the role of the parent. Another appealing paperback for a young teenager is Flame Angels (Mammoth, £4.99)
with Dermot Bolger, Joseph O'Connor and John McGahern among its contributors. I particularly liked the first story, about a young girl temporarily homeless, by June Considine. This anthology also has the advantage of Irish settings.
Vincent Banville, author of the Hennessy series for young teenage boys, says the need for scenarios to which kids could relate was the motivation for his teen-aimed books, but that few other Irish writers seem to be still angling for male readers in this way. Have they just given up?
Or, when all is said and done, should teenagers be dipping into and experimenting with "adult" fiction instead? A random survey of adults in their 20s to 40s on what they read as teenagers brought up names such as Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, and P.G. Wodehouse! After all, enjoyment is the key. It's surprising that parents tend to go for "modern" contemporary releases when there are such riches still on the market that have the patina of age. The Anne of Green Gables books by L.M. Montgomery, which I adored in the distant past, are still around; no sex or drugs in any of these, set in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island around the turn of the century. But then I was a pure child, backward some might say. Once my bookworm mother, obviously concerned about this quandary of the right reading for teenagers, bought home a couple of contemporary American books about teenage girls which featured dilemmas over which dress to wear to the prom and how to do their hair: the onset of periods might have featured. I fled back to Prince Edward Island.
If your teens aren't for the classics - but are a little too old for the new releases, perhaps Alex Garland's The Beach or a John Grisham might grab them. Not the greatest writing in the world, but good yarns. Grisham could well be the bridge to Dostoevsky.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist