TEENAGE FICTION:Weepy yet witty, a 'cancer genre' novel stands out among the latest teen titles
THE TEARY, the scary, fantasy and gung-ho adventure: all may be found in this fictional mixum gatherum. And love interest too, though sometimes only because authors are setting up their skittles for sequels.
One character unlikely to be serialised is Campbell in Wendy Wunder's The Probability of Miracles(Razorbill, £6.99), who, at 17, needs "a goddamn miracle". Her to-do list contains teenagery moping, pouting – anything but her terminal illness. The medical profession has exhausted treatment options, so it's off on a marathon car journey from Florida to Maine, where Cam's flower-power mother hears that magic can happen. They visit her friend in Carolina – also terminally ill – and her nana in Hoboken. Maine brings together wacky old friends, new ones (including a boyfriend), family and, well, a miracle of sorts.
What has been called a “cancer genre” – which includes John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, for example – already exists. This novel, with its unreconstructed sentimentality, slots right in, but it is sardonic and witty as well, and the characters are memorable. Film buffs will enjoy tracing its screen references. I found it as weepy as Love Story – remember the 1970 Segal film?
Differently weepy is Why We Broke Up(Electric Monkey Books, £8.99). Its author is Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, and he is well served by Maira Kalman's wonderful artwork. This book is an extended letter accompanying a box that Min, the letter writer, will deliver to her ex-boyfriend Ed's home. It is crammed with mementos of their affair, now passe. Ed is a jock basketballer, and snivelly Min is "different", "arty" – and a cinema buff. Ed did what jocks do, and now Min is ashamed of having been taken in. She will get over it. It takes more than boxes of sentimental tokens and tissues to make a story.
A chiller thriller is one antidote for the lovelorn, and Ellie James got her site right when she set Shattered Dreams(Quercus, £6.99) in post-hurricane New Orleans. The decaying city provides the backdrop to 16-year-old Trinity's troubled visions. In a cliched start, Trinity spends a night in a haunted house to impress her peers. The ringleader, Jessica, disappears and Trinity fears the worst. She links up with hunky Chase, Jessica's ex, who, expediently from a narrative point of view, is Trinity's sounding board and thereby keeps readers in the loop. All ends well, with Trinity set for a sequel. James rather insistently tells, rather than shows, the horror, and this, together with a somewhat untidy plot, takes from the tale.
In another desperate bid for popularity, Allison, in Maureen Johnson's Devilish(HarperCollins, £6.99), becomes entangled with the devil or, more precisely, a corporation of devils. Suddenly she is uncharacteristically hip and hooks up with her friend Jane's ex. The price is Allison's soul. A battle with demons, a new old boyfriend, another soul saved – Johnson has cracked the paranormal genre.
Maile Meloy's The Apothecary(Andersen Press, £6.99), set in London in 1952, is a whodunnit seasoned with fantasy, and a psychological thriller. Ian Schoenherr's moody black-and-white drawings intensify its atmosphere. Janie, newly arrived from California, casts an outsider's eye over a chilly London. Her screenwriter parents entirely implausibly deposit her in the care of a gin-soaked boarding-house owner. Janie and her new friend, Benjamin, do some spying, assisted by Pip, a Cockney from central casting. Benjamin's father is kidnapped, they are entrusted with a precious book, and the baddie's identity comes as a surprise, as it should.
The story tries too hard to reference historical milestones: McCarthy’s blacklisting, the cold war and the nuclear bomb, for example. However, its least implausible aspect is the adolescents’ desire to save the universe. And given the energy unleashed in the atom bomb, human flight and invisibility pills seem worth considering. Meloy is a talented writer, but less action would deliver more satisfaction.
Rebel Heart(Marion Lloyd Books, £7.99), the second volume in the Dustlands trilogy, is, according to the author, Moira Young, a kind of western set in the future. A gang of thugs led by DeMalo roam the post- apocalyptic territory that Saba and her siblings inhabit. Saba both misses and outgrows the intimacy she once shared with her twin, Lugh. Jack, whom she cared for, is gone, perhaps over to the Tonton. Maybe Jack cannot be trusted. Maybe she can't. The story's turning point finds her consorting with DeMalo and grappling with the fear of pregnancy and the idea of monogamy. Jack and Saba are complex characters negotiating an alien, unyielding landscape.
The False Prince, by Jennifer Nielsen (Scholastic, £6.99), is a refreshingly old-fashioned adventure tale. The cruel Conner plucks Sage from a Dickensian orphanage, to vie with other youngsters for the role of prince of Carthya (the real prince having been lost to pirates). Conner's idea is that the successful boy will deceive the kingdom and be his puppet. Sage, the narrator, is a terrific character, a wily rogue, a quick-witted scoundrel and a match for his tormentor, though hardly as evil. Such a character does not willingly share his secrets with readers, but the twist in the tale is all too evident.
An interesting aspect of this random collection of fiction is that film, rather than novels, supplies its intertextual references. Handler, Wunder and Maile overtly draw on the medium; Hammer Horror is the genre that informs James and Johnson. The parents of Meloy’s Janie work in film, and her plot borrows chunks from the Bond mode. It seems that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the young do not exist until film invents them.
Mary Shine Thompson is a judge of the 2012 Irish Times Poetry Now Award
