“This story ends with me watching my best friend fly off a cliff. Consider yourself warned,” the book begins. The voice in question belongs to 16-year-old Suzy Button, about to start a new school year and aching to fit in. On the first anniversary of her mother’s death, she makes a wish on the moon – the sort of flaky thing her mum loved and that she now misses – and everything changes.
Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick’s Sisters of the Moon (Faber, £8.99) is, like the acclaimed author’s other novels for young people, steeped in myth. Unlike her most recent YA novel, On Midnight Beach, this is not a straightforward retelling of one particular story, but it nods to many myths and legends involving the moon, as Suzy looks back on her strange friendship with the mysterious Rhiannon.
“I see now I should have at least said it out loud to MYSELF. I should have taken a moment, really stopped and examined what was going on in my head ... I kept hearing alarm bells, but I let everything float to the back of my mind because I was having so much fun hanging out with my new friends,” she reflects, aware and yet not letting herself quite believe that Rhiannon makes things happen when she fiddles with those string bracelets of hers.
Fitzpatrick does a superb job at depicting a lonely teenager who’s smart enough to observe deficits in her own behaviour, but yearning enough to not quite mind. The excitement and joy of finding a real gang of friends is portrayed beautifully in a dreamy sequence involving dressing up in angel wings and dancing on the school roof. (The visuals here are a reminder that Fitzpatrick is also an award-winning illustrator; readers will almost certainly have encountered one of her picture books at an earlier stage in life.) This is a hopeful, enchanting tale.
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Another strange girl makes an impact in You Don’t See Me (Little Island, £8.99), the first YA novel from writer and educator Chris Ricketts. Eddy is a literature student filled with more than a little pretension and a gift for flirting; when Ros meets her, life-as-usual is disrupted, not least because everyone at school now thinks Ros is a lesbian. It’s not the right word for this narrator, though: “I want to be with women, just not in this bloody body. How messed-up is that?”
For Ros, “Rosalyn Hughes is like a character in a soap opera. She is as unreal as any TV character … Whoever anyone else thinks they are talking to doesn’t exist.” Eddy, meanwhile, is passionate about celebrating “the feminine and what we do together. We celebrate being women. We don’t need a man to make us happy”. Will coming out mean losing Eddy? Is not coming out possible to live with?
This is a thoughtful exploration of gender and love, with some musings on past lives, avatars and souls thanks to an earnest (if endearing) religion teacher. The psychologically astute observations on classroom dynamics are particularly pleasing, with both students and teachers presented as fully complex human beings trying to get through the day and life in general. Occasionally there are clunky moments – a tragic dead uncle is introduced awkwardly – but overall, this is a book that will be important to many young readers.
The cheerful cover of Rebecca Anderson’s Officially Losing It (Scholastic, £8.99) gives the impression of a fun summer romance, but it too has a message: “Being nice to yourself is not easy in a world where we’re constantly battling against what others are saying and doing, and telling us how we should or shouldn’t be. We’re fighting low confidence, social pressure, the feeling that we’re inadequate or weird or different. No wonder we feel like we need fixing. But that would imply that we’re broken, which we’re not. The only thing that needs fixing here is the nasty voice that tells us we aren’t good enough just as we are.”
It should be no surprise that Anderson is a trained counsellor, and she gives these words to her protagonist, Rose, who decides that’s the area she wants to go into by the end of this novel. But the journey is an interesting one, beginning when Rose’s “first time” with her boyfriend does not go as planned and leads to her discovering a medical complication. Reaching out to an online support group, and then accidentally becoming the go-to person in her school for sex-related issues, lets her see how many other people are struggling, in different ways; it’s a reminder that tough times can (frustratingly!) bring about a “real spiritual awakening” if allowed to do so.
The relationship between Rose and her boyfriend Joel is skilfully done. He manages to avoid being an out-and-out villain, but he is also a teenage boy ill-equipped to deal with what his girlfriend is going through, and their struggles feel believable and nuanced. Similarly, Rose’s difficulties communicating with her friends are well rendered. This novel earns its right to deliver a message at the end.
One of the things Lauren James has consistently handled well in her fiction is internet culture, deftly weaving snippets of articles and posts into various books, always capturing that particular “online” tone of the form in question. So her latest novel, Last Seen Online (Walker Books, £7.99), based on a 2019 digital storytelling project, is an absolute treat. The affection, obsession and insanity of fandom are explored here via the fictional Loch & Ness franchise (featured elsewhere in James’s work), a book and then TV series involving a “sexy selkie police detective” who has some serious chemistry with the local werewolf (obviously).
James, born in the 1990s, is ideally placed to capture the specifics of internet fandom in the 21st century – it’s not just the references to particular websites, but the understanding of the different mentalities within fan spaces, reflected in the range of comments included after each instalment of an online “treatise” arguing that the actors in the TV show were in love but forced to remain closeted. (If this sounds completely unhinged, well – this book is not for you. If it sounds a little unhinged but also you must know more, step on inside. And if you’re already finding parallels with real-world fandom conspiracy theories – why do you not own this book already?)
The insane-shipper vibes give way to something more sinister, though, as we learn that one of the actors is in jail for murdering the other. In the present day, two LA-based teenagers use their detective skills to try to figure out what really happened – ending up in danger themselves. Tremendously enjoyable.
Irish writer Brian Dungan’s fast-paced debut Wintour’s Game (Little Tiger, £8.99) introduces us to the Temporal underworld, a group of individuals with powers involving controlling time. Alex, a 14-year-old thief, is pulled from her regular life after turning up in a fellow Oracle’s vision, but the precise role she’ll play in an important ceremony, and how it relates to the mysterious Chronolith, is unclear for now.
If sometimes heavy on exposition, this book is also crammed with cool and intriguing details about how these time powers work, and by the end I was completely hooked. Bring on the sequel!
