“In 0.46 seconds, absolutely anyone can get access to the pixelated archive of my entire life.” Seventeen-year-old Almond Brown has been “internet famous” since before she was born. As the daughter of a social media influencer, she has always inhabited a world where precious – usually staged – family moments are captured on video and monetised. While her former best friend goes to parties and studies for exams, Almond works to secure sponsorship deals.
Amara Sage’s debut novel, Influential (Faber, £8.99), delves behind the scenes of influencer life, exploring the toll it takes on mental health and relationships despite the apparent glamour. In Almond’s world, the threat of “cancellation” is always looming; she is all too aware of how precarious online popularity is. The concept of being true to yourself rather than seeking the approval of the crowd is a staple of teen literature, and this is a nuanced and eloquent exploration of what that looks like in our digital age.
Like other British writers who’ve addressed the topic of teen influencers (Bryony Gordon, Tamsin Winter), Sage resists suggesting that the solution is to avoid the internet entirely and instead focuses on her protagonist’s search for agency and authenticity. Almond is assisted here by friends she’s made in group therapy, a plot element that is perhaps a little predictable, but forgivable, given the quality of the writing. It’s a pitch-perfect teen voice, blending articulacy with slang and italicised intensity. Almond on her mother’s reminder to update the kind of content she creates, now that her 18th birthday is approaching: “She makes it sound like I can just remodel my interests and personality traits as simply as installing the new iPhone update.”
Or on the seemingly-arbitrary nature of internet hate campaigns: “Is there a set number of followers you have to scrape in to reach untouchable status? Or are we so far removed from the hate itself, desensitised and separated from screen to screen, that’s it’s become less about the target and their individual circumstances and more about the pure Schadenfreude urge to destroy?” This clever-sounding stuff is followed up, brilliantly, with “Yeah, I did A-level Psychology.” Almond is a memorable character, and Sage establishes herself as a writer to watch eagerly.
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The strangeness of our modern era is also explored in Sophie Gonzales’s latest romance, Never Ever Getting Back Together (Hodder, £7.99), centring around a reality TV show. Jordy Miller, a minor celebrity with ties to the fictional monarchy of Chalonne, has sweet-talked his ex-girlfriends into appearing on a new dating show about giving old flames a Second Chance. Skye’s there out of curiosity; Maya’s there for revenge. (Pleasingly, almost none of the girls are there out of love for Jordy, who is most definitely the villain of the piece.)
We soon realise that the antipathy between the two focal characters is down to Jordy’s tendency to bend the truth when it comes to matters such as cheating and “crazy exes”, and delight in the sparks flying between the two girls even as they plot their revenge. There’s a worthwhile message in here about relationship red flags (Gonzales is also a practising psychologist), but it’s also just a sweet, feel-good love story to help combat the January blues.
The same might be said of Laura Wood’s new book, The Agency for Scandal (Scholastic, £8.99), which adds a dollop of mystery to her usual romantic historical plots. Prompted by a genuine snippet of Victorian history about “an army of lady cyclist detectives”, it invites us into the Aviary – an agency of women who “specialize in acquiring the necessary leverage for our clients to live their lives as fully and peacefully as possible . . . I suppose if we were being vulgar we might call it blackmail material.”
It’s a delicious premise, drawing a reader’s attention to the failure of the legal system to adequately protect women as well as providing a source of conflict between heroine Izzy and love interest Max, a duke who is somewhat blinkered by his privilege but – he is the hero, after all – willing to learn. When the two team up to uncover the secret of a ruby brooch, romance tropes pile up (they get caught in a downpour! They must share a bed!), leading up to a slightly implausible yet swoon-worthy declaration of affection. But implausibility is often the point of historical romance; this is not exactly as how things were but how they could have been.
A similar pattern plays out in Adiba Jaigirdar’s Titanic-set heist adventure, A Million To One (Hodder, £7.99), with the Bangladeshi-Irish writer noting some small “creative liberties” taken in an afterword. The ethnic and racial diversity of her heroines – a group of four young women plotting to steal a priceless artefact – is presented as standard, even in the rarefied atmosphere of the doomed liner. Jaigirdar is attentive to the ways in which the girls move differently through the world, experiencing particular kinds of discrimination, but the main focus is on the plot – giving readers the chance to see girls from various backgrounds having adventures.
HF Askwith also turns to the past for inspiration in A Dark Inheritance (Penguin, £8.99). In a world still recovering from the Great War, an anxiety-ridden Felix wonders if he too will succumb to the strange curse that saw his three older brothers die on their 18th birthdays. It turns out he’s quite right to be concerned; when his father returns home with an “unsettling ticking sound where his heartbeat should be”, Felix quickly discovers that the family fortune is linked to a sinister magic, and sets out to attempt to change his own fate.
This is a quick, gripping read that occasionally lectures its readers a little too often about anxiety; at one point the narrator reflects, “If I had learned anything since I discovered the truth about Death Magic, it was that the frightful things were never going to go away, but in painfully expecting and dreading them I suffered twice.” Perhaps skim those segments and focus instead on the supernatural Gatsby-esque atmosphere.
The dangers of the occult also loom large in Cynthia Murphy’s The Midnight Game (Scholastic, £8.99), in which a group of teenagers meet up to play a sinister game in the middle of the night. They’ve met online on “Deddit”, a fictional website for those obsessed with spooky tales and rituals, and in the grand old tradition of teenagers doing stupid things, they’re going to try to summon the Midnight Man. Characterisation takes a serious second place to the twisty, implausible plot; this is a fun read for those who enjoy mounting body counts.
Finally, Ravena Guron’s This Book Kills (Usborne, £8.99) features a scholarship girl at an elite boarding school whose short story inspires the real-life murder of one of her classmates. There is also – inevitably – a secret society on campus, the Regia Club, which the narrator suspects is linked to the death, as she begins “peeling back the golden, elite layer that Heybuckle presented to the world, to reveal a tangled web of darkness beneath the surface”. (We must remember she is a writer.) A satisfying mystery for a winter night.
