TEEN FICTION: IN HER POEM The ConventionalistStevie Smith catches the essence of being a young teenager or, more fairly perhaps, of being a certain kind of young teenager.
She asks, "Fourteen-year-old, why must you giggle and dote, / Fourteen-year-old, why are you such a goat?" and goes on to provide her answer: "I'm fourteen years old, that is the reason, / I giggle and dote in season." It is a poem that, in many respects, could serve as an epigraph for Bridget Hourican's entertaining debut novel, The Bad Karma Diaries(O'Brien, €7.99), in which its two young heroines, Denise and Anna, have their share of "mad, giggly moods when everything is funny", though such a quotation does not quite reach into every corner of a book unafraid to explore some of the less giggly aspects of early adolescence.
Covering the first term of the two friends’ second year at secondary school, the book presents itself in the currently popular format of a diary (Denise’s in this case) while managing to be thoroughly up to date in its inclusion of material from the worlds of blogging and texting.
The escapades recorded, ranging from the girls’ organisation of children’s birthday parties to their plotting revenge on the perpetrators of school bullying, will be a source of considerable amusement for the young reader. They also show Hourican’s perceptive awareness of the volatility of mood and behaviour characteristic of the early teenage years, observed sympathetically but not without a mischievous sense of irony.
There is mischief also in the portrayal of many of the novel’s adult characters, not least in the brief sketch of Lucas, the girls’ headmaster: his address to his pupils on the subject of school bullying is impeccably on target in its tone and structure.
"People think lezzers are freaks and weirdos," says 16-year-old Felicity Costello, whose story is at the centre of Geraldine Meade's Flick(Little Island, €8.99), a very welcome addition to the small group of Irish young-adult novels dealing with gay themes. But while the book courageously traces the heroine's transition from denial to acceptance of her lesbian sexuality, its real focus is less on that sexuality than on portraying a situation where societal responses to an individual in any way different from the norm can create traumas and terrors for that individual.
As she makes her way through her immediate world of parents, older brother, friends, teachers and counsellors, Flick also develops the strength that comes from self-confidence and self-awareness. No one reading the final sentence of this impressive and accomplished novel will be in any doubt about the value or significance of her progress.
From the strictly contemporary settings of Hourican and Meade we move, in Kevin Crossley-Holland's Bracelet of Bones(Quercus, £12.99), to 11th-century Europe, though the details of time and place, fascinating as they are, become of secondary importance to the novel's central theme. Here, yet again, we are confronted by a young woman's compulsion to assert and affirm her independence, as we follow 14-year-old Solveig on a hazardous and character-testing journey in her father's footsteps, all the way from her native Norway to the fabled city of Miklagard (Constantinople). "I can look after myself . . . I'm rising 15," she assures us at one point, and we need little convincing.
By land, river and ocean, and encountering numerous colourful personages en route, Solveig falls into a succession of friendships and enmities, all engagingly re-created by Crossley-Holland. His handling of dialogue and badinage is especially rich and often extremely witty.
Tim Bowler's Buried Thunder(Oxford University Press, £12.99) employs dialogue equally skilfully, but to very different effect. Here the edgy, staccato conversations that typify the novel are completely at one with its prevailing mood of menace and impending terror. Another 14-year-old girl, Maya, dominates the narrative, following her discovery in a forest of "the dead woman, the dead man, the third body, the figure standing over it", as Bowler economically expresses it.
There will be further discoveries to be made in and around the village hotel that Maya's family has recently acquired, involving a cast of characters many of whom have claims, in Midsomer Murdersmode, to be considered quite sinister. And what of the yellow-eyed fox disturbingly given to appearing and vanishing?
From these unsettling ingredients Bowler fashions a powerfully atmospheric psychological thriller in which the resilience of family solidarity is frequently tested by forces beyond its immediate control.
With a dead mother, an alcoholic father and an older brother who has his own concerns, there is not much family solidarity to draw on for 12-year-old Mik, the hero of Mikael Engström's Thin Ice(Little Island, €8.99). The thin ice on which Mik treads, literally and metaphorically, is extremely precarious. Sent by social services to live with a benignly eccentric aunt and subsequently fostered by a far-from-benign dog-breeding family, Mik becomes the victim of an adult world apparently characterised, in the main, by fecklessness and degradation. But there are moments of high comedy also, most obviously in the novel's picturesque assortment of minor characters, some of whom have the life-enhancing qualities so sadly lacking in its more conventional authority figures.
Published originally in Sweden and here translated into fluid, colloquial and page-turning English by Susan Beard, this is a novel of great power and much interest.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s books and reading
