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January’s YA titles: meditations on grief and mortality (don’t worry, there is still kissing)

Including Let the Light In by Jenny Downham and Louis Hill; After Life by Gayle Forman, and The Boy I Love by William Hussey

Louis Hill and Jenny Downham have written a superb example of a book that tackles a lot without finger-wagging over any of it
Louis Hill and Jenny Downham have written a superb example of a book that tackles a lot without finger-wagging over any of it

“If you sent a drone up to look through our window, you’d think we were normal ... You’d study footage from your drone and think we lived in an organised, calm, and politically correct household where the young man is adept at domestic tasks, the young woman is furthering her mind, the child is receiving positive attention and the parent is a good one.”

For teenage siblings Leah and Charlie, nothing’s been normal since their father’s death. They’ve been left to tackle “all the facing-the-world stuff”, with their mother often unable to get out of bed, and despite their shared pain, they’re not the best at relying on one another.

Leah hasn’t told Charlie that she’s distracted from her schoolwork and university plans thanks to the married man she’s been sneaking around with. And Charlie can’t tell Leah about the stupid mess he’s got himself into with the local loan shark, who seemed sympathetic at a key, vulnerable moment. Let the Light In (David Fickling Books, £8.99), co-authored by Jenny Downham (best known for her powerful debut, Before I Die, but always excellent on teenage girls and complicated emotions) and her son, actor and playwright Louis Hill, presents us with various ways of coping with grief, and with complex characters struggling to do what they can in a system not designed for them – being “the people at the bottom of the pile”.

YA has a reputation – not entirely undeserved – for being a tad heavy-handed with its themes sometimes, and this is a superb example of a book that tackles a lot – class, power, mental health – without finger-wagging over any of it. Yes, one character lectures Leah about how “we live in a male-dominated, heteronormative society and the narrative of female empowerment lets you believe you’re in control when you’re not” (the young people are not just looking at those weird talking toilets on their phones, folks, they’re also immersed in cultural theory), but it’s the beginning of a conversation with the reader, rather than a definitive assessment. Leah’s older man may be problematic, to say the least, but he’s not a moustache-twirling villain. Similarly, the swagger of the boy who Charlie finds himself in debt to vanishes around his father, and we understand that this is a tad more nuanced than we might have imagined. This thoughtful, compelling book is one that will lend itself to a lot of discussion.

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Gayle Forman. Photograph: Laina Karavani
Gayle Forman. Photograph: Laina Karavani

It’s been seven years since high-school senior Amber died – but when she arrives home on her bike, this is the first she’s heard of it. Her sister believes it’s her immediately; her parents – now divorced – are slower to accept what’s happened. But as Amber unfurls what’s taken place in her family – and to her friends and boyfriend – since she “left”, she feels like the haunted one. “Suddenly, coming back from the dead doesn’t seem like a miracle so much as a curse. Because dead people don’t have to see how much destruction they left in their wake. And me, I’ve got quite a body count going.”

Gayle Forman, author of If I Stay, returns to magical realism with her latest novel, After Life (Hot Key Books, £8.99), which weaves various stories together as Amber struggles to make sense of her new existence – it’s as much a tangled small-town drama as it is an exploration of grief and death. The ending may feel like a cop-out for some readers, though it’s very much in line with Forman’s previous work; if you prioritise feelings over worldbuilding then it will leave you in an undignified sobbing heap on the floor, as the best books often do.

The Boy I Love by William Hussey is an invitation to revisit the earlier laws that saw Oscar Wilde imprisoned for two years

William Hussey has been described as the UK’s answer to Adam Silvera, mainly for his focus on gay characters, though he also shares Silvera’s interest in genre-hopping. His most recent titles for teenagers have included a dystopian future and a romantic comedy involving zombie movies, and now we have The Boy I Love (Andersen Press, £8.99), a tale of love between two soldiers during the first World War. As is perhaps obligatory, it opens with an epigraph taken from Wilfred Owen writing to Siegfried Sassoon, and the influence of the war poets can be seen throughout the novel – though it is not as smitten with the form as Alice Winn’s In Memoriam (the book this will inevitably be compared to, despite the very different relationship trajectories and dynamics).

“It isn’t age that divides me from Danny McCormick,” protagonist Stephen reflects when he meets the charming new recruit. “I might be as little as six months older than him. It’s the things I have seen.” Already battle-scarred, he’s returning to the front with a medal and a broken heart. The chance to protect Danny, in whatever way he can, is a flicker of light in the dark realm that is war, a thing that “hollows you out, makes you brutal, builds up walls inside you”. But how to protect anyone in a system where young men are slaughtered daily, where the Battle of the Somme looms over the narrative like a thundercloud, where “the bets of old men” are “paid for in young blood”?

Quite aside from this, there is the matter of how – despite whatever blind eyes might be turned at school, despite whatever the poets are able to get away with – homosexual acts are illegal. Hussey’s dystopian tale was really a reflection on section 28, and this is an invitation to revisit the earlier laws – the same ones that saw Oscar Wilde imprisoned for two years. A thoughtful afterword and bibliography accompany this, and are well worth delving into – once one’s heart has stopped pounding from the book itself.

“I know very well what you public schoolboys get up to,” a senior officer sniffs in Hussey’s novel, and honestly, reading fiction would convince you that all boarding schools are rife with roommates falling in hopeless, unspoken love with one another. (“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” Wilde might remind us.) In CG Drews’s horror novel, Don’t Let The Forest In (Hodder Children’s Books, £8.99), Andrew and Thomas yearn painfully for, or maybe at, one another while writing and illustrating dark fairytales and battling the real-life monsters that emerge as a result. This book piles on familiar gothic, teen-angst, queer-romance tropes one after another, and I absolutely lapped it up. In this era of subgenres, I will take “dark academia” over “romantasy” every time, and this is a delicious, addictive, swoon-worthy example of it.

Sometimes the hardest topics work best in compressed forms. (When the world is at its most impossible, we turn to poetry.) Verse novels and graphic novels, two forms which particularly appeal to young people, allow for space to make sense of what’s being said (and what isn’t). In neuroscientist Peter Lantos’s aching, affecting memoir, The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Die (Scholastic, £10.99), illustrated by Victoria Stebleva, the innocence of his five-year-old self – a Hungarian Jew on his way to Bergen-Belsen – is juxtaposed against the reader’s awareness of the horrific context. “They couldn’t believe people could be treated like we were” is a particularly devastating line for contemporary audiences, who witness filmed atrocities regularly, and still can’t quite believe it either.

Claire Hennessy

Claire Hennessy

Claire Hennessy, a contributor to The Irish Times, specialises in reviewing young-adult literature