Mary Shelley looms over several new YA titles this month, which feels fitting for a writer who penned the original edition of Frankenstein in her late teens. The influence is clearest in bestseller Kalynn Bayron’s latest fantasy thriller, Make Me A Monster (Bloomsbury, £8.99), which draws on a theory – more beloved by pop culture than scholars – that Dr Frankenstein was based on German theologian and scientist Johann Konrad Dippel. What if, Bayron’s book asks, one didn’t need lightning to reanimate the dead? What if (ideal for a literary field concerned with teenagers’ individual agency) you had that power within yourself?
Seventeen-year-old Meka is unaware of all of this at the beginning of the novel, though; all she knows is that she has a recurring nightmare about a fatal car crash, and that her life in a funeral home is atypical (“I’ve watched corpses get wheeled into the prep room in the basement of my house for as long as I can remember”). She’s skilled at applying make-up to the recently deceased, and aware of all the unsettling details about corpses – “Dead bodies tend to open their mouths if they aren’t sewn shut.” But even she suspects something’s not quite right when one sits upright, despite her father’s pseudo-scientific explanation for it.
When tragedy strikes, having witnessed so many others grieving doesn’t mean she’s prepared to endure it herself: “How am I supposed to live like that, with this horrible ache always threatening to take me down?” And then a web of secrets falls apart all at once: her father’s been kidnapped, that nightmare is a genuine memory, and someone she thought she’d lost forever has impossibly reappeared. The propulsive energy of the later half of the book more than makes up for some exposition-heavy early chapters, and there’s a deliciously ambiguous ending for book clubs (or the internet) to argue over.
A horrific crash also informs Jennifer Niven’s When We Were Monsters (Penguin, £9.99); it’s been eleven years since Effy’s father was convicted for his role in her mother’s death, and three months since his early release and attempts to repair their relationship. She’s participating in an elite creative writing programme at her fancy boarding school “because I have a story to tell. A story of lives changing in a single moment”, and because such settings are catnip for certain readers (this reviewer included). Effy then immediately cites Victor Frankenstein – “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” – and nudges us towards thinking about monsters and their creation.
READ MORE
The monster in question here is charismatic teacher Meredith Graffam, an acclaimed author and film-maker, whose “magnetic pull … is dizzying. She is one of those people who comes with her own thermosphere, as if she could channel the sun itself.” Despite her appeal, we sense danger – perhaps because we know that inspirational teachers in fiction so often turn out to be bad news, unless portrayed by Robin Williams, and this is doubly so for women (think Jean Brodie). What does Graffam really want from this small group of students – and what is she prepared to do to obtain it?
This is a thoughtful, lyrical tale (“The evening feels psychedelic and loud, the house breathing and expanding around us like some sort of beautiful, consumptive accordion”) with a focus on the power of storytelling and creativity that readers have come to expect from Niven, who has run an online magazine for teens for the past decade. It also features the kind of sensitive love story that fans of her best-known work, All The Bright Places, will be familiar with, which is carefully balanced with the thriller elements. If there are a few overused tropes – the educational institutions of New England must be absolutely riddled with murderous cliques at this point – they are nevertheless welcome in such skilful and nuanced hands.
Yet another Frankenstein reference appears in Emma Shevah’s domestic drama My Name Is Jodie Jones (David Fickling Books, £8.99), marking the children’s author first time writing for teens. Jodie Jones finds strength at a key moment in another oft-quoted line, this time spoken by Frankenstein’s creation: “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
The sympathy for, or at least partial affinity with, the alleged monster here is significant in a book that depicts a monstrous parent. Her unpleasantness is clear from early on, as Jodie relates that her mother is “exasperated that I collect sentences, repeat words again and again, refuse to replace my red Converse with more formal footwear in a public setting, refuse to preoccupy myself with hair care or make-up – refuse to do anything, in fact, that she wants me to do”. This impatience, we may quickly deduce, is down to not understanding or respecting Jodie’s neurodivergent perspective and love for “an interior world that’s mine and mine alone”.
One of Jodie’s passions is words, and Shevah’s role as English and literacy teacher is sometimes felt here – that earnest pedagogical impulse! – but it’s gorgeous enough to be persuasive, with Jodie delighted that “No one can stop me thinking in plosive alliteration and the paltry freedom is epiphanic.” The fun wordplay and attentiveness to language is interwoven with a plaintive adolescent voice: “I used to do her best to make her love me,” she thinks of her mother. While the fracturing of Jodie’s family and reveal of past trauma makes for a satisfyingly dramatic plot, it’s her distinctive voice and view of the world that keeps us compelled.
Sometimes the monsters are just everyday bullies, as in Tia Fisher’s second verse novel, Not Going To Plan (Hot Key Books, £8.99). Marnie (thrown out of her last school for antics like sticking scissors in a socket and planting crocuses in the shape of swear words) and Zed (who finds physics easier than feelings) dual-narrate their burgeoning friendship in the aftermath of a disastrous party, later seriously strained by school gossip.
Zed’s scientific brain is ideal for noting the hypocrisy around reproductive rights (“Everybody shouts / about having sex all the time, / but abortion, it would appear, / is secret & shameful”) and providing some pleasing metaphors (school is a “noisy smelly gut” in which one is “pushed along the intestinal tract of education, / by the peristalsis of the syllabi”). But it’s Marnie’s journey from rebel without to with a cause that’s at the beating heart of the text, and it’s both plausible and engaging.
Finally, Méabh McDonnell has turned away from the monsters she depicted in her first novel, children’s fantasy set in the deep dark woods, moving into YA with an unapologetically cosy romance in which even the villainous types see sense eventually. Any Way You Slice It (O’Brien Press, €12.99) begins with rivals Carrie and Dara thrown out of a baking competition (“Please depart the kitchen with dignity, and with respect for the other bakers still competing”). They reluctantly agree to pair up for the teams competition instead, with bickering quickly giving way to mutual admiration and then, inevitably, kissing. McDonnell is particularly good at conveying that Bake-Off-style pressure – I have never before been breathless over the outcome of fictional macarons. This is – apologies for the pun – a very sweet book.
